Consider a recommender which engages with its user to help her to articulate her short- or longer-term preferences. Consider too a recommender which invites the user to express an opinion about tentative recommendations in order to guide the recommender in making further recommendations. Cases, there is a cycle of interactions between the user and the recommender. We will refer to these as conversational recommenders, and they are the topic of this workshop.
Note that the phrase 'conversational' as defined form does just implies, nor excludes, recommenders That conduct dialogs in natural language. A conversational recommender might converse in natural language, but it may allow more constrained modes of user interaction too.
Research into conversational recommenders was a prominent strand in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Papers on preference elicitation through question-asking and on recommendation critiquing ("like this but cheaper") were common.
While research and development into conversational recommenders has never gone away , it has certainly been less prominent for a while.But this seems to be changing. There seems to be renewed interest in conversational recommenders.
It is this renewed interest that furnishes the rationale for holding this workshop at this time.