With the uptake of algorithmic personalization in the news domain, news organizations increasingly trust automated systems with previously considered editorial responsibilities, e.g., prioritizing news to readers. In this paper we study an automated news recommender system in the context of a news organization's editorial values. We conduct and present two online studies with a news recommender system, which span one and a half months and involve over 1,200 users. In our first study we explore how our news recommender steers reading behavior in the context of editorial values such as serendipity, dynamism, diversity, and coverage. Next, we present an intervention study where we extend our news recommender to steer our readers to more dynamic reading behavior. We find that (i) our recommender system yields more diverse reading behavior and yields a higher coverage of articles compared to non-personalized editorial rankings, and (ii) we can successfully incorporate dynamism in our recommender system as a re-ranking method, effectively steering our readers to more dynamic articles without hurting our recommender system's accuracy.
RecSys Challenge 2024: Balancing Accuracy and Editorial Values in News Recommendations
JP/Politikens Media Group（JP/Politikens媒体集团）；Technical University of Denmark（丹麦技术大学）；Copenhagen Business School（哥本哈根商学院）；ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；University of Bari Aldo Moro（巴里大学）；Politecnico di Bari（巴里理工大学）；Indian Institute of Management Visakhapatnam（维萨卡帕特南印度管理学院）
News recommendation is critical for personalized news access. Existing news recommendation methods usually infer users' personal interest based on their historical clicked news, and train the news recommendation models by predicting future news clicks. A core assumption behind these methods is that news click behaviors can indicate user interest. However, in practical scenarios, beyond the relevance between user interest and news content, the news click behaviors may also be affected by other factors, such as the bias of news presentation in the online platform. For example, news with higher p…
News recommendation is important for online news services. Precise user interest modeling is critical for personalized news recommendation. Existing news recommendation methods usually rely on the implicit feedback of users like news clicks to model user interest. However, news click may not necessarily reflect user interests because users may click a news due to the attraction of its title but feel disappointed at its content. The dwell time of news reading is an important clue for user interest modeling, since short reading dwell time usually indicates low and even negative interest. Thus, i…
News recommendation is important for improving news reading experience of users. Users' news click behaviors are widely used for inferring user interests and predicting future clicks. However, click behaviors are heavily affected by the biases brought by the positions of news displayed on the webpage. It is important to eliminate the effect of position biases on the recommendation model to accurately target user interests. In this paper, we propose a news recommendation method named DebiasGAN that can effectively eliminate the effect of position biases via adversarial learning. We use a bias-a…
Times Internet Limited（Times Internet有限公司）；Birla Institute of Technology & Science Pilani（比尔拉理工学院皮拉尼分校）
In this era of digitisation, news reader tend to read news online. This is because, online media instantly provides access to a wide variety of content. Thus, people don't have to wait for tomorrow's newspaper to know what's happening today. Along with these virtues, online news have some vices as well. One such vice is presence of social media posts (tweets) relating to news articles whose sole purpose is to draw attention of the users rather than directing them to read the actual content. Such posts are referred to as clickbaits. The objective of this project is to develop a system which wou…
News recommendation is often modeled as a sequential recommendation task, which assumes that there are rich short-term dependencies over historical clicked news. However, in news recommendation scenarios users usually have strong preferences on the temporal diversity of news information and may not tend to click similar news successively, which is very different from many sequential recommendation scenarios such as e-commerce recommendation. In this paper, we study whether news recommendation can be regarded as a standard sequential recommendation problem. Through extensive experiments on two …
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）
With the explosion of online news, personalized news recommendation becomes increasingly important for online news platforms to help their users find interesting information. Existing news recommendation methods achieve personalization by building accurate news representations from news content and user representations from their direct interactions with news (e.g., click), while ignoring the high-order relatedness between users and news. Here we propose a news recommendation method which can enhance the representation learning of users and news by modeling their relatedness in a graph setting…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）
News recommendation is a core technique used by many online news platforms. Recommending high-quality news to users is important for keeping good user experiences and news platforms' reputations. However, existing news recommendation methods mainly aim to optimize news clicks while ignoring the quality of news they recommended, which may lead to recommending news with uninformative content or even clickbaits. In this paper, we propose a quality-aware news recommendation method named QualityRec that can effectively improve the quality of recommended news. In our approach, we first propose an ef…
Accurate news representation is critical for news recommendation. Most of existing news representation methods learn news representations only from news texts while ignore the visual information in news like images. In fact, users may click news not only because of the interest in news titles but also due to the attraction of news images. Thus, images are useful for representing news and predicting user behaviors. In this paper, we propose a multimodal news recommendation method, which can incorporate both textual and visual information of news to learn multimodal news representations. We firs…
News recommendation is different from movie or e-commercial recommendation as people usually do not grade the news. Therefore, user feedback for news is always implicit (click behavior, reading time, etc). Inevitably, there are noises in implicit feedback. On one hand, the user may exit immediately after clicking the news as he dislikes the news content, leaving the noise in his positive implicit feedback; on the other hand, the user may be recommended multiple interesting news at the same time and only click one of them, producing the noise in his negative implicit feedback. Opposite implicit…
GLoCIM: Global-view Long Chain Interest Modeling for news recommendation
School of Cyberspace Security, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学网络空间安全学院）；Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University（清华大学电子工程系）；Zhongguancun Laboratory（中关村实验室）
Zhejiang University（浙江大学）；Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab（华为诺亚方舟实验室）；National university of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）
There is a soaring interest in the news recommendation research scenario due to the information overload. To accurately capture users' interests, we propose to model multi-modal features, in addition to the news titles that are widely used in existing works, for news recommendation. Besides, existing research pays little attention to the click decision-making process in designing multi-modal modeling modules. In this work, inspired by the fact that users make their click decisions mostly based on the visual impression they perceive when browsing news, we propose to capture such visual impressi…
User modeling is important for news recommendation. Existing methods usually first encode user's clicked news into news embeddings independently and then aggregate them into user embedding. However, the word-level interactions across different clicked news from the same user, which contain rich detailed clues to infer user interest, are ignored by these methods. In this paper, we propose a fine-grained and fast user modeling framework (FUM) to model user interest from fine-grained behavior interactions for news recommendation. The core idea of FUM is to concatenate the clicked news into a long…
Accurate user interest modeling is important for news recommendation. Most existing methods for news recommendation rely on implicit feedbacks like click for inferring user interests and model training. However, click behaviors usually contain heavy noise, and cannot help infer complicated user interest such as dislike. Besides, the feed recommendation models trained solely on click behaviors cannot optimize other objectives such as user engagement. In this paper, we present a news feed recommendation method that can exploit various kinds of user feedbacks to enhance both user interest modelin…
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）；USTC（中国科学技术大学）；Peking University（北京大学）
News recommendation is very important to help users find interested news and alleviate information overload. Different users usually have different interests and the same user may have various interests. Thus, different users may click the same news article with attention on different aspects. In this paper, we propose a neural news recommendation model with personalized attention (NPA). The core of our approach is a news representation model and a user representation model. In the news representation model we use a CNN network to learn hidden representations of news articles based on their ti…
Universitat Politècnica de València（瓦伦西亚理工大学）；Autoritas Consulting（奥里塔斯咨询公司）
Fake news is risky since it has been created to manipulate the readers' opinions and beliefs. In this work, we compared the language of false news to the real one of real news from an emotional perspective, considering a set of false information types (propaganda, hoax, clickbait, and satire) from social media and online news articles sources. Our experiments showed that false information has different emotional patterns in each of its types, and emotions play a key role in deceiving the reader. Based on that, we proposed a LSTM neural network model that is emotionally-infused to detect false …
News recommendation aims to match news with personalized user interest. Existing methods for news recommendation usually model user interest from historical clicked news without the consideration of candidate news. However, each user usually has multiple interests, and it is difficult for these methods to accurately match a candidate news with a specific user interest. In this paper, we present a candidate-aware user modeling method for personalized news recommendation, which can incorporate candidate news into user modeling for better matching between candidate news and user interest. We prop…
Dwell time has been widely used in various fields to evaluate content quality and user engagement. Although many studies shown that content with long dwell time is good quality, contents with short dwell time have not been discussed in detail. We hypothesize that content with short dwell time is not always low quality and does not always have low user engagement, but is instead related to user interest. The purpose of this study is to clarify the meanings of short dwell time browsing in mobile news application. First, we analyze the relation of short dwell time to user interest using large sca…
The most important task in personalized news recommendation is accurate matching between candidate news and user interest. Most of existing news recommendation methods model candidate news from its textual content and user interest from their clicked news in an independent way. However, a news article may cover multiple aspects and entities, and a user usually has different kinds of interest. Independent modeling of candidate news and user interest may lead to inferior matching between news and users. In this paper, we propose a knowledge-aware interactive matching method for news recommendati…
News recommender systems are essential for helping users to efficiently and effectively find out those interesting news from a large amount of news. Most of existing news recommender systems usually learn topic-level representations of users and news for recommendation, and neglect to learn more informative aspect-level features of users and news for more accurate recommendation. As a result, they achieve limited recommendation performance. Aiming at addressing this deficiency, we propose a novel Aspect-driven News Recommender System (ANRS) built on aspect-level user preference and news repres…
Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is a critical task in online advertising systems. Existing works mainly address the single-domain CTR prediction problem and model aspects such as feature interaction, user behavior history and contextual information. Nevertheless, ads are usually displayed with natural content, which offers an opportunity for cross-domain CTR prediction. In this paper, we address this problem and leverage auxiliary data from a source domain to improve the CTR prediction performance of a target domain. Our study is based on UC Toutiao (a news feed service integrated with the…
The news recommender systems are marked by a few unique challenges specific to the news domain. These challenges emerge from rapidly evolving readers' interests over dynamically generated news items that continuously change over time. News reading is also driven by a blend of a reader's long-term and short-term interests. In addition, diversity is required in a news recommender system, not only to keep the reader engaged in the reading process but to get them exposed to different views and opinions. In this paper, we propose a deep neural network that jointly learns informative news and reader…
Seoul National University（首尔大学）；NAVER Corp（NAVER公司）；POSTECH（浦项工科大学）
Personalized news recommendation aims to provide attractive articles for readers by predicting their likelihood of clicking on a certain article. To accurately predict this probability, plenty of studies have been proposed that actively utilize content features of articles, such as words, categories, or entities. However, we observed that the articles' contextual features, such as CTR (click-through-rate), popularity, or freshness, were either neglected or underutilized recently. To prove that this is the case, we conducted an extensive comparison between recent deep-learning models and naive …
Do We Care About Personalization and Explainability? An Interview Study with News Recommendation Engineers
University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；Jheronimus Academy of Data Science（耶罗尼穆斯数据科学学院）；Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Pilani（比拉理工学院皮拉尼校区）；Eindhoven University of Technology（埃因霍温理工大学）
Personalized web services strive to adapt their services (advertisements, news articles, etc) to individual users by making use of both content and user information. Despite a few recent advances, this problem remains challenging for at least two reasons. First, web service is featured with dynamically changing pools of content, rendering traditional collaborative filtering methods inapplicable. Second, the scale of most web services of practical interest calls for solutions that are both fast in learning and computation. In this work, we model personalized recommendation of news articles as a…
ZoRRO: A Zero-Weight Personalized Recommender System for Scalable News Recommendation
Technical University of Denmark（丹麦技术大学）；ZOZO Research（ZOZO研究公司）；University of California San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）；Pioneer Centre for Artificial Intelligence（先锋人工智能中心）
Peking University（北京大学）；University of Chicago（芝加哥大学）；National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team/Coordination Center of China（国家计算机网络应急技术处理协调中心）
Interactive news recommendation has been launched and attracted much attention recently. In this scenario, user's behavior evolves from single click behavior to multiple behaviors including like, comment, share etc. However, most of the existing methods still use single click behavior as the unique criterion of judging user's preferences. Further, although heterogeneous graphs have been applied in different areas, a proper way to construct a heterogeneous graph for interactive news data with an appropriate learning mechanism on it is still desired. To address the above concerns, we propose a g…
Personalized news recommendation is an essential technique for online news services. News articles usually contain rich textual content, and accurate news modeling is important for personalized news recommendation. Existing news recommendation methods mainly model news texts based on traditional text modeling methods, which is not optimal for mining the deep semantic information in news texts. Pre-trained language models (PLMs) are powerful for natural language understanding, which has the potential for better news modeling. However, there is no public report that show PLMs have been applied t…
Recommendation systems are recognised as being hugely important in industry, and the area is now well understood. At News UK, there is a requirement to be able to quickly generate recommendations for users on news items as they are published. However, little has been published about systems that can generate recommendations in response to changes in recommendable items and user behaviour in a very short space of time. In this paper we describe a new algorithm for updating collaborative filtering models incrementally, and demonstrate its effectiveness on clickstream data from The Times. We also…
Qilu University of Technology (Shandong Academy of Sciences)（齐鲁工业大学（山东省科学院））
A session-based news recommender system recommends the next news to a user by modeling the potential interests embedded in a sequence of news read/clicked by her/him in a session. Generally, a user's interests are diverse, namely there are multiple interests corresponding to different types of news, e.g., news of distinct topics, within a session. %Modeling such multiple interests is critical for precise news recommendation. However, most of existing methods typically overlook such important characteristic and thus fail to distinguish and model the potential multiple interests of a user, imped…
Recall and ranking are two critical steps in personalized news recommendation. Most existing news recommender systems conduct personalized news recall and ranking separately with different models. However, maintaining multiple models leads to high computational cost and poses great challenge to meeting the online latency requirement of news recommender systems. In order to handle this problem, in this paper we propose UniRec, a unified method for recall and ranking in news recommendation. In our method, we first infer user embedding for ranking from the historical news click behaviors of a use…
Recommender Systems (RS) have became a popular research topic and, since 2016, Deep Learning methods and techniques have been increasingly explored in this area. News RS are aimed to personalize users experiences and help them discover relevant articles from a large and dynamic search space. The main contribution of this research was named CHAMELEON, a Deep Learning meta-architecture designed to tackle the specific challenges of news recommendation. It consists of a modular reference architecture which can be instantiated using different neural building blocks. As information about users' past…
NVIDIA（英伟达）；Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica (ITA)（航空技术学院（ITA））；University of Klagenfurt（克拉根福大学）
We describe a hybrid meta-architecture -- the CHAMELEON -- for session-based news recommendation that is able to leverage a variety of information types using Recurrent Neural Networks. We evaluated our approach on two public datasets, using a temporal evaluation protocol that simulates the dynamics of a news portal in a realistic way. Our results confirm the benefits of modeling the sequence of session clicks with RNNs and leveraging side information about users and articles, resulting in significantly higher recommendation accuracy and catalog coverage than other session-based algorithms.
Automatic detection of click-bait and incongruent news headlines is crucial to maintaining the reliability of the Web and has raised much research attention. However, most existing methods perform poorly when news headlines contain contextually important cardinal values, such as a quantity or an amount. In this work, we focus on this particular case and propose a neural attention based solution, which uses a novel cardinal Part of Speech (POS) tag pattern based hierarchical attention network, namely POSHAN, to learn effective representations of sentences in a news article. In addition, we inve…
Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications（北京邮电大学）；Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团）
With the information explosion of news articles, personalized news recommendation has become important for users to quickly find news that they are interested in. Existing methods on news recommendation mainly include collaborative filtering methods which rely on direct user-item interactions and content based methods which characterize the content of user reading history. Although these methods have achieved good performances, they still suffer from data sparse problem, since most of them fail to extensively exploit high-order structure information (similar users tend to read similar news art…
News representation and user-oriented modeling are both essential for news recommendation. Most existing methods are based on textual information but ignore the visual information and users' dynamic interests. However, compared to textual only content, multimodal semantics is beneficial for enhancing the comprehension of users' temporal and long-lasting interests. In our work, we propose a vision-linguistics coordinate time sequence news recommendation. Firstly, a pretrained multimodal encoder is applied to embed images and texts into the same feature space. Then the self-attention network is …
Personalization plays an important role in many services, just as news does. Many studies have examined news personalization algorithms, but few have considered practical environments. This paper provides algorithms and system architecture for generating immediate personalized news in a practical environment. Immediacy means changes in news trends and user interests are reflected in recommended news lists quickly. Since news trends and user interests rapidly change, immediacy is critical in news personalization applications. We develop algorithms and system architecture to realize immediacy. O…
PUNR: Pre-training with User Behavior Modeling for News Recommendation
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学网络空间安全学院）；Du Xiaoman Finance（度小满金融）
Single-tower models are widely used in the ranking stage of news recommendation to accurately rank candidate news according to their fine-grained relatedness with user interest indicated by user behaviors. However, these models can easily inherit the biases related to users' sensitive attributes (e.g., demographics) encoded in training click data, and may generate recommendation results that are unfair to users with certain attributes. In this paper, we propose FairRank, which is a fairness-aware single-tower ranking framework for news recommendation. Since candidate news selection can be bias…
News recommendation for anonymous readers is a useful but challenging task for many news portals, where interactions between readers and articles are limited within a temporary login session. Previous works tend to formulate session-based recommendation as a next item prediction task, while they neglect the implicit feedback from user behaviors, which indicates what users really like or dislike. Hence, we propose a comprehensive framework to model user behaviors through positive feedback (i.e., the articles they spend more time on) and negative feedback (i.e., the articles they choose to skip …
Personalized News Recommendation with Multi-granularity Candidate-aware User Modeling
Shandong University of Science and Technology（山东科技大学）；College of Computer Science and Engineering（计算机科学与工程学院）；Nanning Normal University（南宁师范学院）；Guangxi Key Lab of Human-machine Interaction and Intelligent Decision（广西人机交互与智能决策重点实验室）
University College Groningen, University of Groningen（格罗宁根大学格罗宁根大学学院）；University of Twente（特文特大学）；Univ. Grenoble Alpes（格勒诺布尔阿尔卑斯大学）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；Grenoble INP（格勒诺布尔国立高等物理、数学与信息学院）
In online platforms, recommender systems are responsible for directing users to relevant contents. In order to enhance the users' engagement, recommender systems adapt their output to the reactions of the users, who are in turn affected by the recommended contents. In this work, we study a tractable analytical model of a user that interacts with an online news aggregator, with the purpose of making explicit the feedback loop between the evolution of the user's opinion and the personalised recommendation of contents. More specifically, we assume that the user is endowed with a scalar opinion ab…
Personalized article recommendation is important to improve user engagement on news sites. Existing work quantifies engagement primarily through click rates. We argue that quality of recommendations can be improved by incorporating different types of "post-read" engagement signals like sharing, commenting, printing and e-mailing article links. More specifically, we propose a multi-faceted ranking problem for recommending news articles where each facet corresponds to a ranking problem to maximize actions of a post-read action type. The key technical challenge is to estimate the rates of post-re…
News recommenders help users to find relevant online content and have the potential to fulfill a crucial role in a democratic society, directing the scarce attention of citizens towards the information that is most important to them. Simultaneously, recent concerns about so-called filter bubbles, misinformation and selective exposure are symptomatic of the disruptive potential of these digital news recommenders. Recommender systems can make or break filter bubbles, and as such can be instrumental in creating either a more closed or a more open internet. Current approaches to evaluating recomme…
Breaking News Out of the Filter Bubble: Generative AI Search Diversifies Collective Attention and Raises Shared Information Consumption
Naveen Jindal School of Management, University of Texas at Dallas（德克萨斯大学达拉斯分校纳文·金达尔管理学院）；Questrom School of Business, Boston University（波士顿大学奎斯特罗姆商学院）；Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences, Boston University（波士顿大学计算与数据科学学院）；Kogod School of Business, American University（美国大学科戈德商学院）；School of Business and Management, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学工商管理学院）
