Graph Neural News Recommendation with User Existing and Potential Interest Modeling

Personalized news recommendations can alleviate the information overload problem. To enable personalized recommendation, one critical step is to learn a comprehensive user representation to model her/his interests. Many existing works learn user representations from the historical clicked news articles, which reflect their existing interests. However, these approaches ignore users’ potential interests and pay less attention to news that may interest the users in the future. To address this problem, we propose a novel Graph neural news Recommendation model with user Existing and Potential interest modeling, named GREP. Different from existing works, GREP introduces three modules to jointly model users’ existing and potential interests: (1) Existing Interest Encoding module mines user historical clicked news and applies the multi-head self-attention mechanism to capture the relatedness among the news; (2) Potential Interest Encoding module leverages the graph neural network to explore the user potential interests on the knowledge graph; and (3) Bi-directional Interaction module dynamically builds a news-entity bipartite graph to further enrich two interest representations. Finally, GREP combines the existing and potential interest representations to represent the user and leverages a prediction layer to estimate the clicking probability of the candidate news. Experiments on two real-world large-scale datasets demonstrate the state-of-the-art performance of GREP.