HieRec: Hierarchical User Interest Modeling for Personalized News Recommendation

Tao Qi, Fangzhao Wu, Chuhan Wu, Peiru Yang, Yang Yu, Xing Xie, Yongfeng Huang


Abstract
User interest modeling is critical for personalized news recommendation. Existing news recommendation methods usually learn a single user embedding for each user from their previous behaviors to represent their overall interest. However, user interest is usually diverse and multi-grained, which is difficult to be accurately modeled by a single user embedding. In this paper, we propose a news recommendation method with hierarchical user interest modeling, named HieRec. Instead of a single user embedding, in our method each user is represented in a hierarchical interest tree to better capture their diverse and multi-grained interest in news. We use a three-level hierarchy to represent 1) overall user interest; 2) user interest in coarse-grained topics like sports; and 3) user interest in fine-grained topics like football. Moreover, we propose a hierarchical user interest matching framework to match candidate news with different levels of user interest for more accurate user interest targeting. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets validate our method can effectively improve the performance of user modeling for personalized news recommendation.
Anthology ID:
2021.acl-long.423
Volume:
Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Chengqing Zong, Fei Xia, Wenjie Li, Roberto Navigli
Venues:
ACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5446–5456
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.423
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.acl-long.423
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tao Qi, Fangzhao Wu, Chuhan Wu, Peiru Yang, Yang Yu, Xing Xie, and Yongfeng Huang. 2021. HieRec: Hierarchical User Interest Modeling for Personalized News Recommendation. In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 5446–5456, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
HieRec: Hierarchical User Interest Modeling for Personalized News Recommendation (Qi et al., ACL-IJCNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.423.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.acl-long.423.mp4
Data
MIND