Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network with Personalized and Adaptive Diversity for News Recommendation

The emergence of online media has facilitated the dissemination of news, but has also introduced the problem of information overload. To address this issue, providing users with accurate and diverse news recommendations has become increasingly important. News possesses rich and heterogeneous content, and the factors that attract users to news reading are varied. Consequently, accurate news recommendation requires modeling of both the heterogeneous content of news and the heterogeneous user-news relationships. Furthermore, users’ news consumption is highly dynamic, which is reflected in the differences in topic concentration among different users and in the real-time changes in user interests. To this end, we propose a Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network with Personalized and Adaptive Diversity for News Recommendation (DivHGNN). DivHGNN first represents the heterogeneous content of news and the heterogeneous user-news relationships as an attributed heterogeneous graph. Then, through a heterogeneous node content adapter, it models the heterogeneous node attributes into aligned and fused node representations. With the proposed attributed heterogeneous graph neural network, DivHGNN integrates the heterogeneous relationships to enhance node representation for accurate news recommendations. We also discuss relation pruning, model deployment, and cold-start issues to further improve model efficiency. In terms of diversity, DivHGNN simultaneously models the variance of nodes through variational representation learning for providing personalized diversity. Additionally, a time-continuous exponentially decaying distribution cache is proposed to model the temporal dynamics of user real-time interests for providing adaptive diversity. Extensive experiments on real-world news datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.