LSNR: Learned Sparse News Recommendations with Attentive User Modeling

Abstract

Current learned sparse approaches for recommender systems, such as STAR, represent a user by concatenating their interaction history into a single query string. For news, this creates two bottlenecks: concatenation collapses a user's distinct reading interests into one flat query, and, because news articles are long-form text, concatenating several news articles quickly overruns the context window of the language model used as backbone and forces quality-degrading truncation. To address both bottlenecks, we introduce learned sparse news recommendations (LSNR). LSNR encodes each article independently and constructs a sparse user vector by combining learned, attention-based weighting of the per-article sparse representations with a dense-projected expansion at the user level. Experiments on the MIND and EBNeRD datasets show that LSNR significantly outperforms STAR, with these gains holding even in short-history settings where truncation is not a factor. Compared to state-of-the-art dense recommenders, LSNR is competitive in standard settings and it outperforms them when the user history is short. An ablation of the user encoder confirms that learned attention-based aggregation outperforms simpler pooling alternatives. Beyond effectiveness, an additional advantage of LSNR is that it serves from an index an order of magnitude smaller than an uncompressed dense baseline.