CESRec: Constructing Pseudo Interactions for Sequential Recommendation via Conversational Feedback

Abstract: Sequential Recommendation Systems (SRS) have become essential in many real-world applications. However, existing SRS methods often rely on collaborative filtering signals and fail to capture real-time user preferences, while Conversational Recommendation Systems (CRS) excel at eliciting immediate interests through natural language interactions but neglect historical behavior. To bridge this gap, we propose CESRec, a novel framework that integrates the long-term preference modeling of SRS with the real-time preference elicitation of CRS. We introduce semantic-based pseudo interaction construction, which dynamically updates users'historical interaction sequences by analyzing conversational feedback, generating a pseudo-interaction sequence that seamlessly combines long-term and real-time preferences. Additionally, we reduce the impact of outliers in historical items that deviate from users'core preferences by proposing dual alignment outlier items masking, which identifies and masks such items using semantic-collaborative aligned representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CESRec achieves state-of-the-art performance by boosting strong SRS models, validating its effectiveness in integrating conversational feedback into SRS.