User Modeling with Click Preference and Reading Satisfaction for News Recommendation

User Modeling with Click Preference and Reading Satisfaction for News Recommendation

Chuhan Wu, Fangzhao Wu, Tao Qi, Yongfeng Huang

Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Main track. Pages 3023-3029. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2020/418

Modeling user interest is critical for accurate news recommendation. Existing news recommendation methods usually infer user interest from click behaviors on news. However, users may click a news article because attracted by its title shown on the news website homepage, but may not be satisfied with its content after reading. In many cases users close the news page quickly after click. In this paper we propose to model user interest from both click behaviors on news titles and reading behaviors on news content for news recommendation. More specifically, we propose a personalized reading speed metric to measure users’ satisfaction with news content. We learn embeddings of users from the news content they have read and their satisfaction with these news to model their interest in news content. In addition, we also learn another user embedding from the news titles they have clicked to model their preference in news titles. We combine both kinds of user embeddings into a unified user representation for news recommendation. We train the user representation model using two supervised learning tasks built from user behaviors, i.e., news title based click prediction and news content based satisfaction prediction, to encourage our model to recommend the news articles which not only are likely to be clicked but also have the content satisfied by the user. Experiments on real-world dataset show our method can effectively boost the performance of user modeling for news recommendation.
Keywords:
Machine Learning: Recommender Systems
Humans and AI: Personalization and User Modeling