Evaluating User Engagement in Online News: A Deep Learning Approach Based on Attractiveness and Multiple Features

Online news platforms have become users’ primary information sources. However, they focus on attracting users to click on the news and ignore whether the news triggers a sense of engagement, which could potentially reduce users’ participation in public events. Therefore, this study constructs four indicators by assessing user engagement to build an intelligent system to help platforms optimize their publishing strategies. First, this study defines user engagement evaluation as a classification task that divides user engagement into four indicators and proposes an extended LDA model based on user click–comment behavior (UCCB), using which the attractiveness of words in news headlines and content can be effectively represented. Second, this study proposes a deep user engagement evaluation (DUEE) model that integrates news attractiveness and multiple features in an attention-based deep neural network for user engagement evaluation. The DUEE model considers various elements that collectively determine the ability of the news to attract clicks and engagement. Third, the proposed model is compared with the baseline and state-of-the-art techniques, showing that it outperforms all existing methods. This study provides new research contributions and ideas for improving user engagement in online news evaluation.