Graph Neural News Recommendation with Long-term and Short-term Interest Modeling
The paper presented offers a novel approach to personalized news recommendation by leveraging graph neural networks (GNNs) to address the limitations of existing collaborative filtering (CF) and content-based methods. The proposed model, Graph Neural News Recommendation (GNewsRec), integrates long-term and short-term interest modeling to significantly enhance recommendation accuracy, particularly addressing the sparsity and cold-start problems inherent in traditional recommendation systems.
Methodological Framework
The GNewsRec model distinguishes itself by constructing a heterogeneous user-news-topic graph, capturing user-item interactions with the incorporation of latent topic information. Graph neural networks are employed to learn representations of users and news items by propagating embeddings over this graph, thereby encoding high-order structure information which is vital for understanding user interests and news relevancy. This approach exploits the relationships between users, news items, and latent topics to aggregate more information from fewer interactions.
The model also considers the user's long-term interests—which are relatively stable—and short-term interests, which reflect temporal attractions to certain topics. Long-term interest modeling is achieved through complete historical user clicks on the graph, while short-term interest is captured using an attention-based LSTM model that analyzes recent reading history. By combining these interest representations, the model delivers a comprehensive user modeling approach to news recommendations.
Significant Results
The experimental results on real-world datasets, specifically the Adressa dataset, reveal that GNewsRec outperforms state-of-the-art methods such as DMF, DeepWide, DeepFM, DKN, and DAN in terms of accuracy metrics AUC and F1 score. The proposed model achieves an AUC improvement of over 2% and an F1 score increase of at least 10%, underscoring the efficacy of utilizing GNNs with heterogeneous graph structures and dual-interest modeling.
Implications and Future Research Directions
This research holds substantial implications for the development of news recommendation systems. By integrating high-order structural data and temporal interest considerations, GNewsRec offers a robust framework for overcoming common challenges in news recommendations, such as data sparsity and the cold-start problem. Practically, this could lead to more accurate and personalized user experiences on news platforms through timely and relevant content delivery.
Theoretically, the approach highlights the potential of graph neural networks in recommendation tasks, suggesting further exploration into heterogeneous graph structures and extended applications beyond news content. Future research directions might delve into refining topic modeling techniques within the graph, extending the framework to other types of media platforms, or exploring dynamic graph adaptations as user interests evolve. Moreover, there is potential to integrate additional contextual factors or cross-domain information to further enhance recommendation precision.
In summary, the paper presents a well-conceived and tested framework for news recommendation systems that serves as a significant step forward in leveraging advanced graph-based models for personalized content delivery.