DCAN: Deep Co-Attention Network by Modeling User Preference and News Lifecycle for News Recommendation

Personalized news recommendation systems aim to alleviate information overload and provide users with personalized reading suggestions. In general, each news has its own lifecycle that is depicted by a bell-shaped curve of clicks, which is highly likely to influence users’ choices. However, existing methods typically depend on capturing user preference to make recommendations while ignoring the importance of news lifecycle. To fill this gap, we propose a Deep Co-Attention Network DCAN by modeling user preference and news lifecycle for news recommendation. The core of DCAN is a Co-Attention Net that fuses the user preference attention and news lifecycle attention together to model the dual influence of users’ clicked news. In addition, in order to learn the comprehensive news representation, a Multi-Path CNN is proposed to extract multiple patterns from the news title, content and entities. Moreover, to better capture user preference and model news lifecycle, we present a User Preference LSTM and a News Lifecycle LSTM to extract sequential correlations from news representations and additional features. Extensive experimental results on two real-world news datasets demonstrate the significant superiority of our method and validate the effectiveness of our Co-Attention Net by means of visualization.