A Framework for Interaction-driven User Modeling of Mobile News Reading Behaviour

The news you read is, of course, a highly individual choice and one for which substantial and successful news recommendation techniques have been developed. But as well as what news you read, the way you choose and read that news is also known to be highly individual. We propose a framework for extending the user profile of news readers with features of these interactions. The extensions are dynamic through monitoring an individual's reading and browsing activity. They include factors learned from the user's interaction log and also factors inferred from category level definitions contained in the framework. We report a study in which users' interaction logs with a news app are used to generate user profiles that are verified with self-reported questionnaire data about reading habits. We discuss the implications of our user modeling approach in news personalisation for both recommendation and user interface personalisation for news apps