Session-based News Recommendation from Temporal User Commenting Dynamics

Abstract

With the increase in volume of daily online news items, it is more and more difficult for readers to identify news articles relevant to their interests. Thus, effective recommendation systems are critical for an effective user news consumption experience. Existing news recommendation methods usually rely on the news click history to model user interest. However, there are other signals about user behaviors, such as user commenting activity, which have not been used before. We propose a recommendation algorithm that predicts articles a user may be interested in, given her historical sequential commenting behavior on news articles. We show that following this sequential user behavior the news recommendation problem falls into in the class of session-based recommendation. The techniques in this class seek to model users' sequential and temporal behaviors. While we seek to follow the general directions in this space, we face unique challenges specific to news in modeling temporal dynamics, e.g., users' interests shift over time, users comment irregularly on articles, and articles are perishable items with limited lifespans. We propose a recency-regularized neural attentive framework for session-based news recommendation. The proposed method is able to capture the temporal dynamics of both users and news articles, while maintaining interpretability. We design a lag-aware attention and a recency regularization to model the time effect of news articles and comments. We conduct extensive empirical studies on 3 real-world news datasets to demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.