# News Without Borders: Domain Adaptation of Multilingual Sentence Embeddings for Cross-lingual News Recommendation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.12634 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12634/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 43 of its 69 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 43)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Neural Machine Translation by Jointly Learning to Align and Translate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0473/) (2014)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [BioBERT: a pre-trained biomedical language representation model for biomedical text mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.08746/) (2019)
- [mT5: A massively multilingual pre-trained text-to-text transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11934/) (2020)
- [Don't Stop Pretraining: Adapt Language Models to Domains and Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10964/) (2020)
- [SciBERT: A Pretrained Language Model for Scientific Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.10676/) (2019)
- [Convolutional Neural Networks for Sentence Classification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1408.5882/) (2014)
- [The State and Fate of Linguistic Diversity and Inclusion in the NLP World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09095/) (2020)
- [Deduplicating Training Data Makes Language Models Better](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.06499/) (2021)
- [Language-agnostic BERT Sentence Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.01852/) (2020)
- [Massively Multilingual Sentence Embeddings for Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.10464/) (2018)
- [Massively Multilingual Neural Machine Translation in the Wild: Findings and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05019/) (2019)
- [TOD-BERT: Pre-trained Natural Language Understanding for Task-Oriented Dialogue](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.06871/) (2020)
- [DKN: Deep Knowledge-Aware Network for News Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.08284/) (2018)
- [GPL: Generative Pseudo Labeling for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation of Dense Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07577/) (2021)
- [TSDAE: Using Transformer-based Sequential Denoising Auto-Encoder for Unsupervised Sentence Embedding Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06979/) (2021)
- [SONAR: Sentence-Level Multimodal and Language-Agnostic Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.11466/) (2023)
- [Debiasing Pre-trained Contextualised Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.09523/) (2021)
- [A Few Thousand Translations Go a Long Way! Leveraging Pre-trained Models for African News Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.02022/) (2022)
- [Fast, Effective, and Self-Supervised: Transforming Masked Language Models into Universal Lexical and Sentence Encoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08027/) (2021)
- [Empowering News Recommendation with Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07413/) (2021)
- [Neural News Recommendation with Attentive Multi-View Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.05576/) (2019)
- [Improving Multilingual Sentence Embedding using Bi-directional Dual Encoder with Additive Margin Softmax](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.08564/) (2019)
- [Reducing Gender Bias in Word-Level Language Models with a Gender-Equalizing Loss Function](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.12801/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Pula: Training Large Language Models for Setswana](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.02239/) (2024)
- [AfriNLLB: Efficient Translation Models for African Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.09373/) (2026)
- [Peeling Back the Layers: An In-Depth Evaluation of Encoder Architectures in Neural News Recommenders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01470/) (2024)
- [Large Language Model Driven Recommendation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10946/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Rapidly growing numbers of multilingual news consumers pose an increasing challenge to news recommender systems in terms of providing customized recommendations. First, existing neural news recommenders, even when powered by multilingual language models (LMs), suffer substantial performance losses in zero-shot cross-lingual transfer (ZS-XLT). Second, the current paradigm of fine-tuning the backbone LM of a neural recommender on task-specific data is computationally expensive and infeasible in few-shot recommendation and cold-start setups, where data is scarce or completely unavailable. In this work, we propose a news-adapted sentence encoder (NaSE), domain-specialized from a pretrained massively multilingual sentence encoder (SE). To this end, we construct and leverage PolyNews and PolyNewsParallel, two multilingual news-specific corpora. With the news-adapted multilingual SE in place, we test the effectiveness of (i.e., question the need for) supervised fine-tuning for news recommendation, and propose a simple and strong baseline based on (i) frozen NaSE embeddings and (ii) late click-behavior fusion. We show that NaSE achieves state-of-the-art performance in ZS-XLT in true cold-start and few-shot news recommendation.