Personalizing News Headlines with Retrieval-Augmented Generation

Jiajing Wan, Samia Touileb, Lubos Steskal, Lilja Øvrelid


Abstract
We focus on personalized news headline generation, where we aim to improve headline generation by extending the generation context to incorporate the news reading history of users. In particular, we study a RAG-LLM-based system that customizes news headlines with user histories to improve news headline personalization. Our experiments show that our approach not only produces better headlines for specific users, but also makes the generated headlines closer to the original headlines. We experiment with different retrievers and analyze the generated outputs through systematic comparisons with both original and rewritten headlines. These analyses provide insights into the role of retrieval and personalization in headline generation, highlighting how the user history contributes to meaningful improvement while remaining aligned with original headlines.
Anthology ID:
2026.customnlp4u-1.6
Volume:
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Customizable NLP: Progress and Challenges in Customizing NLP for a Domain, Application, Group, or Individual (CustomNLP4U)
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, USA
Editors:
Sheshera Mysore, Sachin Kumar, Vidhisha Balachandran, Shirley Anugrah Hayati, Faeze Brahman, Hanane Nour Moussa, Alireza Salemi
Venues:
CustomNLP4U | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
55–67
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.customnlp4u-1.6/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jiajing Wan, Samia Touileb, Lubos Steskal, and Lilja Øvrelid. 2026. Personalizing News Headlines with Retrieval-Augmented Generation. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Customizable NLP: Progress and Challenges in Customizing NLP for a Domain, Application, Group, or Individual (CustomNLP4U), pages 55–67, San Diego, California, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Personalizing News Headlines with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (Wan et al., CustomNLP4U 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.customnlp4u-1.6.pdf