CAFI: News Recommendation with Candidate Perception of Fine-Grained Interaction Information

The most critical task in personalized news recommendation is to perform exact matching between candidate news and users’ interests. Existing news recommendation methods usually model users’ interests from historical clicked news items without considering candidate news, which makes it difficult to precisely match candidate news with users’ interests. Moreover, it is challenging to distinguish similar news when forming a vector representation. Simply adding candidate news to the user interest modeling process without considering word-level information does not provide sufficient discrimination for recommending appropriate news. In this paper, we propose a news recommendation model with candidate-aware fine-grained interaction information (CAFI). In our approach, we propose a fine-grained interaction module that matches candidate news items and text fragments of each historical news item at each semantic granularity to achieve interaction between the two at the word level and help similar historical news form more specific and accurate representations. In addition, our proposed gated self-attention mechanism utilizes the candidate news features as channel moderation gates to implement the process of filtering out information that is irrelevant to the candidate news for learning user interest representations, thereby better matching the candidate news to specific user interests. Experiments conducted on the large real-world Microsoft News Dataset (MIND) show that our model significantly outperforms the previously developed models in terms of all metrics. Our code is published at the following URL: https://github.com/liyiweneven/CAFI.