News recommendation can help users find interested news and alleviate information overload. Precisely modeling news and users is critical for news recommendation, and capturing the contexts of words and news is important to learn news and user representations. In this paper, we propose a neural news recommendation approach with multi-head selfattention (NRMS). The core of our approach is a news encoder and a user encoder. In the news encoder, we use multi-head self-attentions to learn news representations from news titles by modeling the interactions between words. In the user encoder, we learn representations of users from their browsed news and use multihead self-attention to capture the relatedness between the news. Besides, we apply additive attention to learn more informative news and user representations by selecting important words and news. Experiments on a realworld dataset validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our approach.

News recommendation is an important technique for personalized news service. Compared with product and movie recommendations which have been comprehensively studied, the research on news recommendation is much more limited, mainly due to the lack of a high-quality benchmark dataset. In this paper, we present a large-scale dataset named MIND for news recommendation. Constructed from the user click logs of Microsoft News, MIND contains 1 million users and more than 160k English news articles, each of which has rich textual content such as title, abstract and body. We demonstrate MIND a good testbed for news recommendation through a comparative study of several state-of-the-art news recommendation methods which are originally developed on different proprietary datasets. Our results show the performance of news recommendation highly relies on the quality of news content understanding and user interest modeling. Many natural language processing techniques such as effective text representation methods and pre-trained language models can effectively improve the performance of news recommendation. The MIND dataset will be available at https://msnews.github.io.

News recommendation aims to display news articles to users based on their personal interest. Existing news recommendation methods rely on centralized storage of user behavior data for model training, which may lead to privacy concerns and risks due to the privacy-sensitive nature of user behaviors. In this paper, we propose a privacy-preserving method for news recommendation model training based on federated learning, where the user behavior data is locally stored on user devices. Our method can leverage the useful information in the behaviors of massive number users to train accurate news recommendation models and meanwhile remove the need of centralized storage of them. More specifically, on each user device we keep a local copy of the news recommendation model, and compute gradients of the local model based on the user behaviors in this device. The local gradients from a group of randomly selected users are uploaded to server, which are further aggregated to update the global model in the server. Since the model gradients may contain some implicit private information, we apply local differential privacy (LDP) to them before uploading for better privacy protection. The updated global model is then distributed to each user device for local model update. We repeat this process for multiple rounds. Extensive experiments on a real-world dataset show the effectiveness of our method in news recommendation model training with privacy protection.

Modeling user interest is critical for accurate news recommendation. Existing news recommendation methods usually infer user interest from click behaviors on news. However, users may click a news article because attracted by its title shown on the news website homepage, but may not be satisfied with its content after reading. In many cases users close the news page quickly after click. In this paper we propose to model user interest from both click behaviors on news titles and reading behaviors on news content for news recommendation. More specifically, we propose a personalized reading speed metric to measure users’ satisfaction with news content. We learn embeddings of users from the news content they have read and their satisfaction with these news to model their interest in news content. In addition, we also learn another user embedding from the news titles they have clicked to model their preference in news titles. We combine both kinds of user embeddings into a unified user representation for news recommendation. We train the user representation model using two supervised learning tasks built from user behaviors, i.e., news title based click prediction and news content based satisfaction prediction, to encourage our model to recommend the news articles which not only are likely to be clicked but also have the content satisfied by the user. Experiments on real-world dataset show our method can effectively boost the performance of user modeling for news recommendation.

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