Generating User-Engaging News Headlines

Pengshan Cai, Kaiqiang Song, Sangwoo Cho, Hongwei Wang, Xiaoyang Wang, Hong Yu, Fei Liu, Dong Yu


Abstract
The potential choices for news article headlines are enormous, and finding the right balance between conveying the essential message and capturing the reader’s attention is key to effective headlining. However, presenting the same news headline to all readers is a suboptimal strategy, because it does not take into account the different preferences and interests of diverse readers, who may be confused about why a particular article has been recommended to them and do not see a clear connection between their interests and the recommended article. In this paper, we present a novel framework that addresses these challenges by incorporating user profiling to generate personalized headlines, and a combination of automated and human evaluation methods to determine user preference for personalized headlines. Our framework utilizes a learnable relevance function to assign personalized signature phrases to users based on their reading histories, which are then used to personalize headline generation. Through extensive evaluation, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework in generating personalized headlines that meet the needs of a diverse audience. Our framework has the potential to improve the efficacy of news recommendations and facilitate creation of personalized content.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-long.183
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3265–3280
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.183
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.183
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Pengshan Cai, Kaiqiang Song, Sangwoo Cho, Hongwei Wang, Xiaoyang Wang, Hong Yu, Fei Liu, and Dong Yu. 2023. Generating User-Engaging News Headlines. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 3265–3280, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Generating User-Engaging News Headlines (Cai et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.183.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.183.mp4