PPT: A Minor Language News Recommendation Model via Cross-Lingual Preference Pattern Transfer

Yiyang Zhang, Nan Chen


Abstract
Rich user-item interactions are essential for building reliable recommender systems, as they reflect user preference patterns. However, minor language news recommendation platforms suffer from limited interactions due to a small user base. A natural solution is to apply well-established English recommender systems to minor language news recommendation, but the linguistic gap can lead to inaccurate modeling of minor language news content. Therefore, enabling few-shot minor language news recommender systems to capture both content information and preference patterns remains a challenge. Based on the observation that preference patterns are similar across languages, we propose a minor language news recommendation model by cross-lingual preference pattern transfer, named PPT. Our model adopts the widely used two-tower architecture and employs the large language model as the backbone of the news encoder. Through cross-lingual alignment, the strong English capability of the news encoder is extended to minor languages, thus enhancing news content representations. Additionally, through cross-lingual news augmentation, PPT simulates interactions of minor language news in the English domain, which facilitates the transfer of preference patterns from the many-shot English domain to the few-shot minor language domain. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets across 15 minor languages demonstrate the superiority and generalization of our proposed PPT in addressing minor language news recommendation.
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-long.526
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
10728–10745
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.acl-long.526/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yiyang Zhang and Nan Chen. 2025. PPT: A Minor Language News Recommendation Model via Cross-Lingual Preference Pattern Transfer. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 10728–10745, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
PPT: A Minor Language News Recommendation Model via Cross-Lingual Preference Pattern Transfer (Zhang & Chen, ACL 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.acl-long.526.pdf