Generating User-Engaging News Headlines

Abstract

The potential choices for news article headlines are enormous, and finding the right balance between conveying the essential message and capturing the reader’s attention is key to effective headlining. However, presenting the same news headline to all readers is a suboptimal strategy, because it does not take into account the different preferences and interests of diverse readers, who may be confused about why a particular article has been recommended to them and do not see a clear connection between their interests and the recommended article. In this paper, we present a novel framework that addresses these challenges by incorporating user profiling to generate personalized headlines, and a combination of automated and human evaluation methods to determine user preference for personalized headlines. Our framework utilizes a learnable relevance function to assign personalized signature phrases to users based on their reading histories, which are then used to personalize headline generation. Through extensive evaluation, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed framework in generating personalized headlines that meet the needs of a diverse audience. Our framework has the potential to improve the efficacy of news recommendations and facilitate creation of personalized content.

Publication
In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Kaiqiang Song
Kaiqiang Song
Senior Research Scientist

Kaiqiang Song (宋凯强) is a Senior Research Scientist at Tencent AI Lab, Seattle, specializing in Natural Language Processing. His research focuses on advancing artificial intelligence through machine learning, NLP, and large language models. He is dedicated to optimizing AI model architectures for practical applications like text summarization and text generation, bridging the gap between foundational AI research and real-world impact.