Large Language Models for Generative Recommendation: A Survey and Visionary Discussions

Lei Li, Yongfeng Zhang, Dugang Liu, Li Chen

Research output: Chapter in book/report/conference proceedingConference proceedingpeer-review

1 Citation (Scopus)

Abstract

Large language models (LLM) not only have revolutionized the field of natural language processing (NLP) but also have the potential to reshape many other fields, e.g., recommender systems (RS). However, most of the related work treats an LLM as a component of the conventional recommendation pipeline (e.g., as a feature extractor), which may not be able to fully leverage the generative power of LLM. Instead of separating the recommendation process into multiple stages, such as score computation and re-ranking, this process can be simplified to one stage with LLM: directly generating recommendations from the complete pool of items. This survey reviews the progress, methods, and future directions of LLM-based generative recommendation by examining three questions: 1) What generative recommendation is, 2) Why RS should advance to generative recommendation, and 3) How to implement LLM-based generative recommendation for various RS tasks. We hope that this survey can provide the context and guidance needed to explore this interesting and emerging topic.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
EditorsNicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
PublisherEuropean Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Pages10146-10159
Number of pages14
ISBN (Electronic)9782493814104
Publication statusPublished - May 2024
EventJoint 30th International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 14th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC-COLING 2024 - Hybrid, Torino, Italy
Duration: 20 May 202425 May 2024

Publication series

NameJoint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC-COLING - Main Conference Proceedings

Conference

ConferenceJoint 30th International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 14th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC-COLING 2024
Country/TerritoryItaly
CityHybrid, Torino
Period20/05/2425/05/24

Scopus Subject Areas

  • Theoretical Computer Science
  • Computational Theory and Mathematics
  • Computer Science Applications

User-Defined Keywords

  • Generative Recommendation
  • Information Retrieval
  • Large Language Models
  • Recommender Systems

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