Gordon Edall


2019

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Content-based Dwell Time Engagement Prediction Model for News Articles
Heidar Davoudi | Aijun An | Gordon Edall
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 2 (Industry Papers)

The article dwell time (i.e., expected time that users spend on an article) is among the most important factors showing the article engagement. It is of great interest to predict the dwell time of an article before its release. This allows digital newspapers to make informed decisions and publish more engaging articles. In this paper, we propose a novel content-based approach based on a deep neural network architecture for predicting article dwell times. The proposed model extracts emotion, event and entity features from an article, learns interactions among them, and combines the interactions with the word-based features of the article to learn a model for predicting the dwell time. The experimental results on a real dataset from a major newspaper show that the proposed model outperforms other state-of-the-art baselines.