Group-Based Personalized News Recommendation with Long- and Short-Term Fine-Grained Matching

Personalized news recommendation aims to help users find news content they prefer, which has attracted increasing attention recently. There are two core issues in news recommendation: learning news representation and matching candidate news with user interests. In this context, “candidate” indicates potential for interest. Due to the superior ability to understand natural language demonstrated by Pretrained Language Models (PLMs), recent works utilize PLMs (e.g., BERT) to strengthen news modeling, obtaining more accurate user interest matching and achieving notable improvement in news recommendation. However, the existing PLM-based methods are usually incapable of fully exploring the fine-grained (i.e., word-level) relatedness between user behaviors and candidate news due to the heavy computational cost brought by PLMs. In this article, we propose a group-based personalized news recommendation method with long- and short-term matching mechanisms between users and candidate news based on PLMs to learn fine-grained matching efficiently and effectively. In our approach, we design to group user historical clicked news into chunks with quite shorter news sequences according to their clicked timestamps, which could alleviate the computation issues of PLMs. PLMs are applied in each group jointly with the candidate news to capture their word-level interaction, and global group-level matching is learned across different groups. In addition, the group-based mechanism could be naturally adapted for long- and short-term user representation learning, in which we build users’ long preferences from the representations of all groups and treat the last group as short interests, respectively. Finally, we employ a gate network to dynamically unify the group-level, long- and short-term representations, yielding comprehensive user-news matching effectively. Extensive experiments are conducted on two real-world datasets. The results show that our proposed method achieves superior performance in news recommendations.