@inproceedings{kim-etal-2025-towards,
    title = "Towards Personalized Conversational Sales Agents: Contextual User Profiling for Strategic Action",
    author = "Kim, Tongyoung  and
      Lee, Jeongeun  and
      Yoon, SooJin  and
      Kim, SungHwan  and
      Lee, Dongha",
    editor = "Christodoulopoulos, Christos  and
      Chakraborty, Tanmoy  and
      Rose, Carolyn  and
      Peng, Violet",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025",
    month = nov,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Suzhou, China",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/author-page-yu-wang-polytechnic/2025.findings-emnlp.275/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.findings-emnlp.275",
    pages = "5131--5154",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-335-7",
    abstract = "Conversational Recommender Systems (CRSs) aim to engage users in dialogue to provide tailored recommendations. While traditional CRSs focus on eliciting preferences and retrieving items, real-world e-commerce interactions involve more complex decision-making, where users consider multiple factors beyond simple attributes. To capture this complexity, we introduce Conversational Sales (CSALES), a novel task that integrates preference elicitation, recommendation, and persuasion within a unified conversational framework. To support realistic and systematic evaluation, we present CSUSER, an evaluation protocol with LLM-based user simulator grounded in real-world behavioral data by modeling fine-grained user profiles for personalized interaction. We also propose CSI, a conversational sales agent that proactively infers contextual user profiles and strategically selects actions through conversation. Comprehensive experiments show that CSI significantly improves both recommendation success and persuasive effectiveness across diverse user profiles."
}