Predicting User Demography and Device from News Comments

Demographics of online users such as age and gender play an important role in personalized web applications, particularly in the News domain. However, it is difficult to directly obtain the demographic information of online users. Past works have attempted to predict user demography based on reading patterns obtained from news browsing data. However, such data can be very limited. Luckily, in recent years, posts and comments have become much prevalent among online users, and the comments from users of different demographics exhibit differences in contents and writing styles. Thus, comments can provide additional clues for demographic prediction. In this paper, we study predicting users' demographics based on both news browsing data and the associated user generated comments. To this end, we make a novel use of a recently introduced BERT-based model to embed each comment in the context of its associated article. We experiment on real-world datasets, and explore the contribution of both browsing data and user generated data in the task of predicting three different user attributes: gender, location type (e.g., rural vs. urban), and mobile device. Finally we show that our approach can effectively improve the performance of such predictions and outperforms baseline methods.