CROWN: A Novel Approach to Comprehending Users’ Preferences for Accurate Personalized News Recommendation

Abstract

Personalized news recommendation aims to assist users in finding news articles that align with their interests, which plays a pivotal role in mitigating users’ information overload problem. Despite the breakthrough in personalized news recommendation, the following challenges have been rarely explored: (C1) Comprehending manifold intents coupled within a news article, (C2) Differentiating varying post-read preferences of news articles, and (C3) Addressing the cold-start user problem. To tackle these challenges together, we propose a novel personalized news recommendation framework (CROWN) that employs (1) category-guided intent disentanglement for (C1), (2) consistency-based news representation for (C2), and (3) GNN-enhanced hybrid user representation for (C3). Furthermore, we incorporate a category prediction into the training process of CROWN as an auxiliary task for enhancing intent disentanglement. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets reveal that (1) CROWN outperforms twelve state-of-the-art news recommendation methods and (2) the proposed strategies significantly improve the accuracy of CROWN.