Neural News Recommendation with Event Extraction

Abstract: A key challenge of online news recommendation is to help users find articles they are interested in. Traditional news recommendation methods usually use single news information, which is insufficient to encode news and user representation. Recent research uses multiple channel news information, e.g., title, category, and body, to enhance news and user representation. However, these methods only use various attention mechanisms to fuse multi-view embeddings without considering deep digging higher-level information contained in the context. These methods encode news content on the word level and jointly train the attention parameters in the recommendation network, leading to more corpora being required to train the model. We propose an Event Extraction-based News Recommendation (EENR) framework to overcome these shortcomings, utilizing event extraction to abstract higher-level information. EENR also uses a two-stage strategy to reduce parameters in subsequent parts of the recommendation network. We train the Event Extraction module by external corpora in the first stage and apply the trained model to the news recommendation dataset to predict event-level information, including event types, roles, and arguments, in the second stage. Then we fuse multiple channel information, including event information, news title, and category, to encode news and users. Extensive experiments on a real-world dataset show that our EENR method can effectively improve the performance of news recommendations. Finally, we also explore the reasonability of utilizing higher abstract level information to substitute news body content.