Recommender systems (RS) play important roles to match users' information
needs for Internet applications. In natural language processing (NLP) domains,
large language model (LLM) has shown astonishing emergent abilities (e.g.,
instruction following, reasoning), thus giving rise to the promising research
direction of adapting LLM to RS for performance enhancements and user
experience improvements. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive survey on
this research direction from an application-oriented view. We first summarize
existing research works from two orthogonal perspectives: where and how to
adapt LLM to RS. For the "WHERE" question, we discuss the roles that LLM could
play in different stages of the recommendation pipeline, i.e., feature
engineering, feature encoder, scoring/ranking function, and pipeline
controller. For the "HOW" question, we investigate the training and inference
strategies, resulting in two fine-grained taxonomy criteria, i.e., whether to
tune LLMs or not, and whether to involve conventional recommendation model
(CRM) for inference. Detailed analysis and general development trajectories are
provided for both questions, respectively. Then, we highlight key challenges in
adapting LLM to RS from three aspects, i.e., efficiency, effectiveness, and
ethics. Finally, we summarize the survey and discuss the future prospects. We
also actively maintain a GitHub repository for papers and other related
resources in this rising direction:
https://github.com/CHIANGEL/Awesome-LLM-for-RecSys.Comment: 15 pages; 3 figures; summarization table in appendi