  Bundle recommender systems recommend sets of items (e.g., pants, shirt, and
shoes) to users, but they often suffer from two issues: significant interaction
sparsity and a large output space. In this work, we extend multi-round
conversational recommendation (MCR) to alleviate these issues. MCR, which uses
a conversational paradigm to elicit user interests by asking user preferences
on tags (e.g., categories or attributes) and handling user feedback across
multiple rounds, is an emerging recommendation setting to acquire user feedback
and narrow down the output space, but has not been explored in the context of
bundle recommendation. In this work, we propose a novel recommendation task
named Bundle MCR. We first propose a new framework to formulate Bundle MCR as
Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) with multiple agents, for user modeling,
consultation and feedback handling in bundle contexts. Under this framework, we
propose a model architecture, called Bundle Bert (Bunt) to (1) recommend items,
(2) post questions and (3) manage conversations based on bundle-aware
conversation states. Moreover, to train Bunt effectively, we propose a
two-stage training strategy. In an offline pre-training stage, Bunt is trained
using multiple cloze tasks to mimic bundle interactions in conversations. Then
in an online fine-tuning stage, Bunt agents are enhanced by user interactions.
Our experiments on multiple offline datasets as well as the human evaluation
show the value of extending MCR frameworks to bundle settings and the
effectiveness of our Bunt design.
