Information Retrieval Lab (IRLab) of the Informatics Institute, is one of the partners of REM Lab (Responsible Media Lab), that focuses on the use of generative technologies in news search and recommendation. Maarten de Rijke is co-directror of REM Lab.

The paper, entitled 'Towards Empathetic Conversational Recommender Systems' presents an empathetic conversational recommendation framework. To generate human-like emotional responses, the framework applies retrieval-augmented prompts to fine-tune a pre-trained language model to align with emotions and mitigate hallucination.

Paper details: Xiaoyu Zhang (Shandong University), Ruobing Xie (Tencent), Yougang Lyu (Shandong University and University of Amsterdam), Xin Xin (Shandong University), Pengjie Ren (Shandong University), Mingfei Liang (Tencent), Bo Zhang (Tencent), Zhanhui Kang (Tencent), Maarten de Rijke (University of Amsterdam), and Zhaochun Ren (Leiden University). Towards Empathetic Conversational Recommender Systems. Link: https://irlab.science.uva.nl/wp-content/papercite-data/pdf/zhang-2024-towards.pdf