Abstract: People have information needs of varying complexity, which can be solved by an intelligent agent able to answer questions formulated in a proper way, eventually considering user context and preferences. In a scenario in which the user profile can be considered as a question, intelligent agents able to answer questions can be used to find the most relevant answers for a given user. In this work we propose a novel model based on Artificial Neural Networks to answer questions with multiple answers by exploiting multiple facts retrieved from a knowledge base. The model is evaluated on the factoid Question Answering and top-n recommendation tasks of the bAbI Movie Dialog dataset. After assessing the performance of the model on both tasks, we try to define the long-term goal of a conversational recommender system able to interact using natural language and to support users in their information seeking processes in a personalized way.

Introduction: We are surrounded by a huge variety of technological artifacts which “live” with us today. These artifacts can help us in several ways because they have the power to accomplish complex and time-consuming tasks. Unfortunately, common software systems can do for us only specific types of tasks, in a strictly algorithmic way which is pre-defined by the software designer. Machine Learning (ML), a branch of Artificial Intelligence (AI), gives machines the ability to learn to complete tasks without being explicitly programmed. People have information needs of varying complexity, ranging from simple questions about common facts which can be found in encyclopedias, to more sophisticated cases in which they need to know what movie to watch during a romantic evening. These tasks can be solved by an intelligent agent able to answer questions formulated in a proper way, eventually considering user context and preferences. Question Answering (QA) emerged in the last decade as one of the most promising fields in AI, since it allows to design intelligent systems which are able to give correct answers to user questions expressed in natural language. Whereas, recommender systems produce individualized recommendations as output and have the effect of guiding the user in a personalized way to interesting or useful objects in a large space of possible options. In a scenario in which the user profile (the set of user preferences) can be represented by a question, intelligent agents able to answer questions can be used to find the most appealing items for a given user, which is the classical task that recommender systems can solve. Despite the efficacy of classical recommender systems, generally they are not able to handle a conversation with the user so they miss the possibility of understanding his contextual information, emotions and feedback to refine the user profile and provide enhanced suggestions. Conversational recommender systems assist online users in their information-seeking and decision making tasks by supporting an interactive process BIBREF0 which could be goal oriented with the task of starting general and, through a series of interaction cycles, narrowing down the user interests until the desired item is obtained BIBREF1 . In this work we propose a novel model based on Artificial Neural Networks to answer questions exploiting multiple facts retrieved from a knowledge base and evaluate it on a QA task. Moreover, the effectiveness of the model is evaluated on the top-n recommendation task, where the aim of the system is to produce a list of suggestions ranked according to the user preferences. After having assessed the performance of the model on both tasks, we try to define the long-term goal of a conversational recommender system able to interact with the user using natural language and to support him in the information seeking process in a personalized way. In order to fulfill our long-term goal of building a conversational recommender system we need to assess the performance of our model on specific tasks involved in this scenario. A recent work which goes in this direction is reported in BIBREF2 , which presents the bAbI Movie Dialog dataset, composed by different tasks such as factoid QA, top-n recommendation and two more complex tasks, one which mixes QA and recommendation and one which contains turns of dialogs taken from Reddit. Having more specific tasks like QA and recommendation, and a more complex one which mixes both tasks gives us the possibility to evaluate our model on different levels of granularity. Moreover, the subdivision in turns of the more complex task provides a proper benchmark of the model capability to handle an effective dialog with the user. For the task related to QA, a lot of datasets have been released in order to assess the machine reading and comprehension capabilities and a lot of neural network-based models have been proposed. Our model takes inspiration from BIBREF3 , which is able to answer Cloze-style BIBREF4 questions repeating an attention mechanism over the query and the documents multiple times. Despite the effectiveness on the Cloze-style task, the original model does not consider multiple documents as a source of information to answer questions, which is fundamental in order to extract the answer from different relevant facts. The restricted assumption that the answer is contained in the given document does not allow the model to provide an answer which does not belong to the document. Moreover, this kind of task does not expect multiple answers for a given question, which is important for the complex information needs required for a conversational recommender system. According to our vision, the main outcomes of our work can be considered as building blocks for a conversational recommender system and can be summarized as follows: The paper is organized as follows: Section SECREF2 describes our model, while Section SECREF3 summarizes the evaluation of the model on the two above-mentioned tasks and the comparison with respect to state-of-the-art approaches. Section SECREF4 gives an overview of the literature of both QA and recommender systems, while final remarks and our long-term vision are reported in Section SECREF5 .

Question: How well does their model perform on the recommendation task?
Answer: Proposed model achieves HITS@100 of 30.0 compared to best baseline model result of 29.2 on recommendation task.