HGTA: News Recommendation Based on Hierarchical Granular Semantic Embeddings and Threshold Attention

Personalized news recommendation helps users find interesting content among much news information. Most existing news recommendation techniques densely interact a user’s historical clicked news with candidate news to capture their reading interest. However, during this process, even if certain historical clicked news is weakly correlated with the candidate news, the model still interacts with it, generating more noise information when constructing user interests. Simultaneously, the news representation learning process using neural networks is a fine-grained to coarse-grained learning process; i.e., as the network deepens, the fine-grained original news information is easily lost. Therefore, to solve the above problems, this paper proposes a news recommendation model based on hierarchical granular semantic embeddings and threshold attention (HGTA). In HGTA, we propose a threshold attention module to filter unimportant historical clicked news by setting an attention score threshold, i.e., interacting only with historical clicked news that is strongly correlated with the candidate news when capturing user interests. Thus, the model attention is focused, and the noisy interaction information is reduced. Furthermore, when training the neural network, to prevent the loss of fine-grained information, we design a hierarchical granular information extraction module to capture both coarse- and fine-grained news features to better enrich the news semantics. Experiments conducted on the large real-world Microsoft News Dataset (MIND) show that our model achieves highly competitive results in terms of popular metrics. Our code is published at the following URL: https://github.com/liyiweneven/HGTA.