LANCE: Exploration and Reflection for LLM-based Textual Attacks on News Recommender Systems

A significant increase in news sources has been brought about by the growth of the online and the social web. The easy access to numerous news sources results in a flood of information that is frequently contradictory and confusing. When news circulates on the social web, it can be challenging to distinguish between legitimate and false reports. False news can be used for a variety of purposes, including as political influence, financial gain, and strict convictions to solve these problems, a new news aggregator was developed to help users distinguish between authentic, fake, and copy content. News from multiple news sources is reviewed, approved, and presented to the client in the suggested system. The news aggregator also suggests important news to the customer by anticipating consumer preference via a recommendation algorithm. It has been demonstrated that news recommendation systems can naturally handle lengthy articles and distinguish between them for readers who are taking into account established models.

Recent rises in political polarization across the globe are often ascribed to algorithmic content filtering on social media, news platforms, or search engines. The widespread usage of news recommendation systems (NRS) is theorized to drive users in homogenous information environments and, thereby, drive affective, ideological, and perceived polarization. To test this assumption, we conducted an online experiment ( n = 750) with running algorithms that enriches content-based NRS with negative or neutral sentiment. Our experiment finds only limited evidence for polarization effects of content-based NRS. Nevertheless, the time spent with an NRS and its recommended articles seems to play a crucial role as a moderator of polarization. The longer participants were using an NRS enriched with negative sentiment, the more they got affectively polarized, whereas participants using an NRS incorporating balanced sentiment ideologically depolarized over time. Implications for future research are discussed.

This study aims to explore the impact of personalized news recommendation systems based on big data and artificial intelligence algorithms on audience cognition and behavior. With the rapid development of information technology, news recommendation systems have been widely used in the media industry, but their impact on audiences has not been fully studied. This paper adopts a mixed research method, combining questionnaire surveys, in-depth interviews and experimental research, and conducts a three-month follow-up survey on 500 news app users. The results show that the personalized recommendation system significantly increases users' news reading volume and retention time, but also leads to the intensification of information cocoon effect and cognitive bias. In addition, the study finds that the transparency of the recommendation algorithm, the user's media literacy level and the diversity of news sources are key factors affecting audience cognition and behavior. Based on the research findings, this paper proposes suggestions for optimizing the news recommendation system, improving users' media literacy and promoting information diversification, in order to minimize the negative impact of personalized recommendations while improving user experience. This study has important theoretical and practical significance for understanding the characteristics of audience behavior in the intelligent media environment, improving the design of news recommendation systems and formulating relevant policies.

With the continuous development of information technology, we are now in an era of information explosion, and we are also facing the problem of information overload, i.e., it is difficult to find the news that interests us from the huge news sources on the Internet. Based on this problem, this paper proposes a perceptron model-based news recommendation system, which uses the perceptron model to extract news keywords and realize the classification of the news; for user interest preferences, we analyze users’ news browsing preferences by collecting user behavior logs and use a multi-layer perceptron model to aggregate users’ interest features. The perceptron model is compared with traditional recommendation methods in terms of accuracy and recall, and one user is selected from 50 users who have been using the system for three months to analyze their news browsing preferences by single-day, short-term and long-term news data to verify the effectiveness of the perceptron model in aggregating users’ interest features. In terms of accuracy and recall, the accuracy of the perceptron model is higher than that of the traditional method for each news type, improving the accuracy by at least 5%-10%, e.g., 10% for real estate news and 9% for financial news. The recall rate of the perceptron model is improved by more than 6% for all news types except for social and entertainment news types. In terms of user interest preference mining, the whole change process of user browsing preference trend is in line with the human forgetting curve, which verifies that the perceptron model in the system is better used and meets the design requirements. Therefore, the applicability and reliability of the model proposed in this paper for news recommendation systems are verified in terms of accuracy, recall, and user interest preference mining.

A fusion sorting model based on logical regression is used to solve the problem of information overload in the news recommendation system and meet the personalized needs of users. First, the fusion sorting model is trained based on the article data and user data, and the original candidate news set is obtained by multi-channel recall method. Then the original candidate set is filtered by the fusion sorting model, and the recommendation list is generated. Finally, the experiment is carried out based on the Wuli News Recommendation System. Under the evaluation indexes of precision, recall and ILS, the fusion sorting model adopted significantly improves the recommendation ability of the system, and achieves the goal of making multiple single recommendation strategies make up for each other’s shortcomings.

An increasing number of media organisations are adopting news recommender systems (NRS). Such algorithmic technologies, which prioritise content based on, for example, previous user behaviour or popularity metrics, may have far-reaching repercussions for news work. Despite this, the implications of NRS implementation for intra-organisational practices as well as dynamics and tensions between involved actors remain understudied. Against this background, this study examines decision-making processes and relationships between actors participating in NRS projects from an institutional logics perspective and places a particular emphasis on resulting tensions between journalistic, market, and tech logics. Drawing on 32 in-depth qualitative interviews with news media professionals across ten news organisations in the Netherlands and Switzerland, we discover a wide range of strategies which aim to reconcile logic multiplicity in the specific case of NRS development. Such negotiation efforts can ultimately promote new work practices and forms of collaboration but may also have broader implications for the distribution of power and voice within news organisations.

Increasingly, algorithms play an important role in everyday decision-making processes. Recommender systems, specifically, are algorithms that serve to influence end-users’ decision-making (e.g. what to read, who to befriend, who to rent to…). However, the companies that develop and produce these systems are not neutral, but have an economic goal and specific vision on how society should operate. These algorithms should thus never be trusted blindly.
 An algorithm consists of collective human practices and consequently warm human and institutional choices. Therefore, they should be perceived as culture. Despite the many academics that are joining the debate to denounce the bias, opaqueness and unfairness often found in these algorithms, little empirical research has invested in treating algorithms in its socio-technical assembly as culture.
 To better understand how end-users perceive these algorithmic systems, we strive to understand how they imagine and (dis)trust the different components of the socio-technical assembly. We are demystifying the imagined processes incorporated in these algorithmic systems in the minds of the end-user using a deconstructed version of Buchers’ (2017) algorithmic imaginary.
 Currently, companies put ever more effort into personalizing news, using news recommender systems (NRS). NRS organize, select and aggregate news to influence the decision-making of an end-user without a transparent explanation on the process. Therefore, we focus our study on the end-users of these NRS.
 In this qualitative study, we are interviewing 25 end-users of NRS to understand the assumptions and apprehend the (dis-)trust people have about the different elements of the socio-technical assembly of news recommender systems.

Using complex language models has been a common strategy as personalized news recommendation systems are adopted by online news sites more and more. Before the epoch of GPT-3, news recommendation systems underwent a progression from rule-based and collaborative filtering approaches in the pre-2010s, through the integration of neural networks in the 2010s, to the emergence of earlier iterations of large language models like GPT-2 in 2019. Pre-trained language models have ushered in a new era of recommendation paradigms, thanks to the emergence of huge language models like GPT-3 and T-5. With its easy-to-use interface, ChatGPT is becoming more and more popular for text-based jobs. Focusing on news provider fairness, individualized news recommendations, and fake news identification, this study starts an inquiry into ChatGPT's efficacy in news recommendations. We acknowledge that ChatGPT's output sensitivity to input phrasing is a limitation, and our goal is to investigate these limitations from each angle. We also investigate whether certain prompt formats can help to alleviate these constraints or if more research is needed. To go beyond set assessments, we create a webpage where ChatGPT's performance on the examined activities and prompts is tracked once a week. Through the use of big language models, this work seeks to improve news recommendation performance and stimulate more research in this area.

Recommender systems are becoming an essential part of smart services. When building a news recommender system, we should consider special features different from other recommender systems. Hot news topics are changing every moment, thus it is important to recommend right news at the right time. This paper aims to propose a new model, based on deep neural network, to analyse user preference for news recommender system. The model extracts interest keywords to characterize the user preference from the set of news articles read by that particular user in the past. The model utilizes characterizing features for news recommendation, and applies those to the keyword classification for user preference. For the keyword classification, we use deep neural network for online preference analysis, because adaptive learning is necessary to track changes of hot topics sensitively. The usefulness of our model is validated through experiments. In addition, the accuracy and diversity of the recommendation results is also analysed.

How do users interact with algorithm recommender systems? The interaction of users, algorithms, and performance

Online news article reading has become very popular as the World Wide Web provides an access to variety of news articles from large volume of sources around the world. A key challenge of news portals is to provide articles to the users based on their interest. Personalized news recommendation systems provide news articles to the readers based on their interest rather than presenting articles in order of their occurrences. The effectiveness of news recommendation systems reduces due to lack of user ratings and automated novelty detection. A progressive summary helps a user to monitor changes in news items over a period of time. The automatic detection of novelty in personalized news recommendation system could improve a reader's search experience by providing news items that add more information's to already known information's to the users. This paper presents a rough set based collaborative filtering approach to predict a missing news category rating values of a user, and a new novelty detection approach to improve ranking of novel news items. The proposed approach maximizes the accuracy of the news article recommendation to the user according to their interest. Experimental results show the efficiency of the proposed approach.

In recent years, the type and quantity of news are growing rapidly, and it is not easy for users to find the news they are interested in the massive amount of news. A news recommendation system can score and predict the candidate news, and finally recommend the news with high scores to users. However, existing user models usually only consider users’ long-term interests and ignore users’ recent interests, which affects users’ usage experience. Therefore, this paper introduces gated recurrent unit (GRU) sequence network to capture users’ short-term interests and combines users’ short-term interests and long-term interests to characterize users. While existing models often only use the user’s browsing history and ignore the variability of different users’ interest in the same news, we introduce additional user’s ID information and apply the personalized attention mechanism for user representation. Thus, we achieve a more accurate user representation. We also consider the risk of compromising user privacy if the user model training is placed on the server side. To solve this problem, we design the training of the user model locally on the client side by introducing a federated learning framework to keep the user’s browsing history on the client side. We further employ secure multi-party computation to request news representations from the server side, which protects privacy to some extent. Extensive experiments on a real-world news dataset show that our proposed news recommendation model has a better improvement in several performance evaluation metrics. Compared with the current state-of-the-art federated news recommendation models, our model has increased by 0.54% in AUC, 1.97% in MRR, 2.59% in nDCG@5%, and 1.89% in nDCG@10. At the same time, because we use a federated learning framework, compared with other centralized news recommendation methods, we achieve privacy protection for users.

The most current news recommendations are suitable for news which comes from a single news website, not for news from different heterogeneous news websites. Previous researches about news recommender systems based on different strategies have been proposed to provide news personalization services for online news readers. However, little research work has been reported on utilizing hundreds of heterogeneous news websites to provide top hot news services for group customers (e.g., government staffs). In this paper, we propose a hot news recommendation model based on Bayesian model, which is from hundreds of different news websites. In the model, we determine whether the news is hot news by calculating the joint probability of the news. We evaluate and compare our proposed recommendation model with the results of human experts on the real data sets. Experimental results demonstrate the reliability and effectiveness of our method. We also implement this model in hot news recommendation system of Hangzhou city government in year 2013, which achieves very good results.

A concept is a key phrase which can represent an entity, event or idea that people are interested in. Concept-centric Web news recommendation is a novel content-based recommendation paradigm which can partially alleviate the cold-start problem and provide better recommendation results in terms of diversity than traditional news recommendation systems, as it can capture users’ interest in a natural way and can even recommend a new Web news to a user as long as it is conceptually relevant to a main concept of the Web news the user is browsing. This demonstration paper presents a novel CONcept-Centric nEws Recommendation sysTem called CONCERT. CONCERT consists of two parts: (1) A concept extractor which is based on machine learning algorithms and can extract main concepts from Web news pages, (2) A real-time recommender which recommends conceptually relevant Web news to a user based on the extracted concepts.

In news recommendation system, the content-based method face the lack of diversity that recommended results will only contain the news similar with user's former read. The hybrid method face cold-start problem that the candidate news must wait enough click to recommend. We propose a fused method which is capable of handling the diversity problem of content-based and cold-start problem of hybrid approach. We use content-based method to extract user's existed interest firstly. Find out similar user set and predict target user's potential interest by collaborative filtering secondly. Fuse existed interest and potential interest to obtain the final user profile the third. Generate the recommended results after comparison the similarity of candidate news and final user profile lastly. This approach results in an offline news set and compared Diversity and F-score with other recommendation method. It decreases the lack of diversity compare with content-based approach and avoids the cold-start problem compare with hybrid method.