Personalized news recommendation aims to deliver news articles aligned with users' interests, serving as a key solution to alleviate the problem of information overload on online news platforms. While prior work has improved interest matching through refined representations of news and users, the following time-related challenges remain underexplored: (C1) leveraging the age of clicked news to infer users' interest persistence, and (C2) modeling the varying lifetime of news across topics and users. To jointly address these challenges, we propose a novel Lifetime-aware Interest Matching framework for nEws recommendation, named LIME, which incorporates three key strategies: (1) User-Topic lifetime-aware age representation to capture the relative age of news with respect to a user-topic pair, (2) Candidate-aware lifetime attention for generating temporally aligned user representation, and (3) Freshness-guided interest refinement for prioritizing valid candidate news at prediction time. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that LIME consistently outperforms a wide range of state-of-the-art news recommendation methods, and its model agnostic strategies significantly improve recommendation accuracy.

Matching candidate news with user interests is crucial for personalized news recommendations. Most existing methods can represent a user's reading interests through a single profile based on clicked news, which may not fully capture the diversity of user interests. Although some approaches incorporate candidate news or topic information, they remain insufficient because they neglect the multi-granularity relatedness between candidate news and user interests. To address this, this study proposed a multi-granularity candidate-aware user modeling framework that integrated user interest features across various levels of granularity. It consisted of two main components: candidate news encoding and user modeling. A news textual information extractor and a knowledge-enhanced entity information extractor can capture candidate news features, and word-level, entity-level, and news-level candidate-aware mechanisms can provide a comprehensive representation of user interests. Extensive experiments on a real-world dataset demonstrated that the proposed model could significantly outperform baseline models.

Personalized news headline generation, aiming at generating user-specific headlines based on readers' preferences, burgeons a recent flourishing research direction. Existing studies generally inject a user interest embedding into an encoderdecoder headline generator to make the output personalized, while the factual consistency of headlines is inadequate to be verified. In this paper, we propose a framework Fact-Preserved Personalized News Headline Generation (short for FPG), to prompt a tradeoff between personalization and consistency. In FPG, the similarity between the candidate news to be exposed and the historical clicked news is used to give different levels of attention to key facts in the candidate news, and the similarity scores help to learn a fact-aware global user embedding. Besides, an additional training procedure based on contrastive learning is devised to further enhance the factual consistency of generated headlines. Extensive experiments conducted on a real-world benchmark PENS validate the superiority of FPG, especially on the tradeoff between personalization and factual consistency.

News recommendation aims to predict click behaviors based on user behaviors. How to effectively model the user representations is the key to recommending preferred news. Existing works are mostly focused on improvements in the supervised fine-tuning stage. However, there is still a lack of PLM-based unsupervised pre-training methods optimized for user representations. In this work, we propose an unsupervised pre-training paradigm with two tasks, i.e. user behavior masking and user behavior generation, both towards effective user behavior modeling. Firstly, we introduce the user behavior masking pre-training task to recover the masked user behaviors based on their contextual behaviors. In this way, the model could capture a much stronger and more comprehensive user news reading pattern. Besides, we incorporate a novel auxiliary user behavior generation pre-training task to enhance the user representation vector derived from the user encoder. We use the above pre-trained user modeling encoder to obtain news and user representations in downstream fine-tuning. Evaluations on the real-world news benchmark show significant performance improvements over existing baselines.

Accurately recommending candidate news articles to users is a basic challenge faced by personalized news recommendation systems. Traditional methods are usually difficult to grasp the complex semantic information in news texts, resulting in unsatisfactory recommendation results. Besides, these traditional methods are more friendly to active users with rich historical behaviors. However, they can not effectively solve the "long tail problem" of inactive users. To address these issues, this research presents a novel general framework that combines Large Language Models (LLM) and Knowledge Graphs (KG) into semantic representations of traditional methods. In order to improve semantic understanding in complex news texts, we use LLMs' powerful text understanding ability to generate news representations containing rich semantic information. In addition, our method combines the information about news entities and mines high-order structural information through multiple hops in KG, thus alleviating the challenge of long tail distribution. Experimental results demonstrate that compared with various traditional models, the framework significantly improves the recommendation effect. The successful integration of LLM and KG in our framework has established a feasible path for achieving more accurate personalized recommendations in the news field. Our code is available at https://github.com/Xuan-ZW/LKPNR.

Some recent \textit{news recommendation} (NR) methods introduce a Pre-trained Language Model (PLM) to encode news representation by following the vanilla pre-train and fine-tune paradigm with carefully-designed recommendation-specific neural networks and objective functions. Due to the inconsistent task objective with that of PLM, we argue that their modeling paradigm has not well exploited the abundant semantic information and linguistic knowledge embedded in the pre-training process. Recently, the pre-train, prompt, and predict paradigm, called \textit{prompt learning}, has achieved many successes in natural language processing domain. In this paper, we make the first trial of this new paradigm to develop a \textit{Prompt Learning for News Recommendation} (Prompt4NR) framework, which transforms the task of predicting whether a user would click a candidate news as a cloze-style mask-prediction task. Specifically, we design a series of prompt templates, including discrete, continuous, and hybrid templates, and construct their corresponding answer spaces to examine the proposed Prompt4NR framework. Furthermore, we use the prompt ensembling to integrate predictions from multiple prompt templates. Extensive experiments on the MIND dataset validate the effectiveness of our Prompt4NR with a set of new benchmark results.

News recommendation (NR) is essential for online news services. Existing NR methods typically adopt a news-user representation learning framework, facing two potential limitations. First, in news encoder, single candidate news encoding suffers from an insufficient semantic information problem. Second, existing graph-based NR methods are promising but lack effective news-user feature interaction, rendering the graph-based recommendation suboptimal. To overcome these limitations, we propose dual-interactive graph attention networks (DIGAT) consisting of news- and user-graph channels. In the news-graph channel, we enrich the semantics of single candidate news by incorporating the semantically relevant news information with a semantic-augmented graph (SAG). In the user-graph channel, multi-level user interests are represented with a news-topic graph. Most notably, we design a dual-graph interaction process to perform effective feature interaction between the news and user graphs, which facilitates accurate news-user representation matching. Experiment results on the benchmark dataset MIND show that DIGAT outperforms existing news recommendation methods. Further ablation studies and analyses validate the effectiveness of (1) semantic-augmented news graph modeling and (2) dual-graph interaction.

News feed recommendation is an important web service. In recent years, pre-trained language models (PLMs) have been intensively applied to improve the recommendation quality. However, the utilization of these deep models is limited in many aspects, such as lack of explainability and being incompatible with the existing inverted index systems. Above all, the PLMs based recommenders are inefficient, as the encoding of user-side information will take huge computation costs. Although the computation can be accelerated with efficient transformers or distilled PLMs, it is still not enough to make timely recommendations for the active users, who are associated with super long news browsing histories. In this work, we tackle the efficient news recommendation problem from a distinctive perspective. Instead of relying on the entire input (i.e., the collection of news articles a user ever browsed), we argue that the user's interest can be fully captured merely with those representative keywords. Motivated by this, we propose GateFormer, where the input data is gated before feeding into transformers. The gating module is made personalized, lightweight and end-to-end learnable, such that it may perform accurate and efficient filtering of informative user input. GateFormer achieves highly impressive performances in experiments, where it notably outperforms the existing acceleration approaches in both accuracy and efficiency. We also surprisingly find that even with over 10-fold compression of the original input, GateFormer is still able to maintain on-par performances with the SOTA methods.

The key to personalized news recommendation is to match the user's interests with the candidate news precisely and efficiently. Most existing approaches embed user interests into a representation vector then recommend by comparing it with the candidate news vector. In such a workflow, fine-grained matching signals may be lost. Recent studies try to cover that by modeling fine-grained interactions between the candidate news and each browsed news article of the user. Despite the effectiveness improvement, these models suffer from much higher computation costs online. Consequently, it remains a tough issue to take advantage of effective interactions in an efficient way. To address this problem, we proposed an end-to-end Selective Fine-grained Interaction framework (SFI) with a learning-to-select mechanism. Instead of feeding all historical news into interaction, SFI can quickly select informative historical news w.r.t. the candidate and exclude others from following computations. We empower the selection to be both sparse and automatic, which guarantees efficiency and effectiveness respectively. Extensive experiments on the publicly available dataset MIND validates the superiority of SFI over the state-of-the-art methods: with only five historical news selected, it can significantly improve the AUC by 2.17% over the state-of-the-art interaction-based models; at the same time, it is four times faster.

Online news recommender systems aim to address the information explosion of news and make personalized recommendation for users. In general, news language is highly condensed, full of knowledge entities and common sense. However, existing methods are unaware of such external knowledge and cannot fully discover latent knowledge-level connections among news. The recommended results for a user are consequently limited to simple patterns and cannot be extended reasonably. Moreover, news recommendation also faces the challenges of high time-sensitivity of news and dynamic diversity of users' interests. To solve the above problems, in this paper, we propose a deep knowledge-aware network (DKN) that incorporates knowledge graph representation into news recommendation. DKN is a content-based deep recommendation framework for click-through rate prediction. The key component of DKN is a multi-channel and word-entity-aligned knowledge-aware convolutional neural network (KCNN) that fuses semantic-level and knowledge-level representations of news. KCNN treats words and entities as multiple channels, and explicitly keeps their alignment relationship during convolution. In addition, to address users' diverse interests, we also design an attention module in DKN to dynamically aggregate a user's history with respect to current candidate news. Through extensive experiments on a real online news platform, we demonstrate that DKN achieves substantial gains over state-of-the-art deep recommendation models. We also validate the efficacy of the usage of knowledge in DKN.