CRSLab: An Open-Source Toolkit for Building Conversational Recommender System

AbstractIn recent years, conversational recommender systems (CRSs) have drawn a wide attention in the research community, which focus on providing high-quality recommendations to users via natural language conversations. However, due to diverse scenarios and data formats, existing studies on CRSs lack unified and standardized implementation or comparison. To tackle this challenge, we release an open-source toolkit CRSLab, which provides a unified and extensible framework with highly-decoupled modules to develop CRSs. Based on this framework, we collect 6 commonly used human-annotated CRS datasets and implement 19 models that include advanced techniques such as graph neural networks and pre-training models. Besides, our toolkit provides a series of automatic evaluation protocols and a human-machine interaction interface to evaluate and compare different CRS methods. The project and documents are released at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/CRSLab.