Tiny-NewsRec: Effective and Efficient PLM-based News Recommendation

Yang Yu, Fangzhao Wu, Chuhan Wu, Jingwei Yi, Qi Liu


Abstract
News recommendation is a widely adopted technique to provide personalized news feeds for the user. Recently, pre-trained language models (PLMs) have demonstrated the great capability of natural language understanding and benefited news recommendation via improving news modeling. However, most existing works simply finetune the PLM with the news recommendation task, which may suffer from the known domain shift problem between the pre-training corpus and downstream news texts. Moreover, PLMs usually contain a large volume of parameters and have high computational overhead, which imposes a great burden on low-latency online services. In this paper, we propose Tiny-NewsRec, which can improve both the effectiveness and the efficiency of PLM-based news recommendation. We first design a self-supervised domain-specific post-training method to better adapt the general PLM to the news domain with a contrastive matching task between news titles and news bodies. We further propose a two-stage knowledge distillation method to improve the efficiency of the large PLM-based news recommendation model while maintaining its performance. Multiple teacher models originated from different time steps of our post-training procedure are used to transfer comprehensive knowledge to the student model in both its post-training stage and finetuning stage. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets validate the effectiveness and efficiency of our method.
Anthology ID:
2022.emnlp-main.368
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5478–5489
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.368
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.emnlp-main.368
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yang Yu, Fangzhao Wu, Chuhan Wu, Jingwei Yi, and Qi Liu. 2022. Tiny-NewsRec: Effective and Efficient PLM-based News Recommendation. In Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 5478–5489, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Tiny-NewsRec: Effective and Efficient PLM-based News Recommendation (Yu et al., EMNLP 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.emnlp-main.368.pdf
Dataset:
 2022.emnlp-main.368.dataset.zip
Software:
 2022.emnlp-main.368.software.zip