Personalized News Article Recommendation with Novelty Using Collaborative Filtering Based Rough Set Theory

In this era of fake news and political polarization, it is desirable to have a system to enable users to access balanced news content. Current solutions focus on top down, server based approaches to decide whether a news article is fake or biased, and display only trusted news to the end users. In this paper, we follow a different approach to help the users make informed choices about which news they want to read, making users aware in real time of the bias in news articles they were browsing and recommending news articles from other sources on the same topic with different levels of bias. We use a recent Pew research report to collect news sources that readers with varying political inclinations prefer to read. We then scrape news articles on a variety of topics from these varied news sources. After this, we perform clustering to find similar topics of the articles, as well as calculate a bias score for each article. For a news article the user is currently reading, we display the bias score and also display other articles on the same topic, out of the previously collected articles, from different news sources. This we present to the user. This approach, we hope, would make it possible for users to access more balanced articles on given news topics. We present the implementation details of the system along with some preliminary results on news articles.

Accurate forecasting of upcoming trends in the capital markets is extremely important for algorithmic trading and investment management. Before making a trading decision, investors estimate the probability that a certain news item will influence the market based on the available information. Speculation among traders is often caused by the release of a breaking news article and results in price movements. Publications of news articles influence the market state that makes them a powerful source of data in financial forecasting. Recently, researchers have developed trend and price prediction models based on information extracted from news articles. However, to date no previous research that investigates the advantages of using news articles with different levels of relevance to the target stock has been conducted. This research study uses the multiple kernel learning technique to effectively combine information extracted from stock-specific and sub-industry-specific news articles for prediction of an upcoming price movement. News articles are divided into these two categories based on their relevance to a targeted stock and analyzed by separate kernels. The experimental results show that utilizing two categories of news improves the prediction accuracy in comparison with methods based on a single news category.

The interest of users in handheld devices is strongly related to their location. Therefore, the user location is important, as a user context, for news article recommendation in a mobile environment. This paper proposes a novel news article recommendation that reflects the geographical context of the user. For this purpose, we propose the Explicit Localized Semantic Analysis (ELSA), an ESA-based topical representation of documents. Every location has its own geographical topics, which can be captured from the geo-tagged documents related to the location. Thus, not only news articles but locations are also represented as topic vectors. The main advantage of ELSA is that it stresses only the topics that are relevant to a given location, whereas all topics are equally important in ESA. As a result, geographical topics have different importance according to the user location in ELSA, even if they come from the same article. Another advantage of ELSA is that it allows a simple comparison of the user location and news articles, because it projects both locations and articles onto an identical space composed of Wikipedia topics. In the evaluation of ELSA with the New York Times corpus, it outperformed two simple baselines of Bag-Of-Words and LDA as well as two ESA-based methods. Rt10 of ELSA was improved up to 46.25% over other methods, and its [email protected] was always higher than those of the others regardless of k.

News articles categorization is a supervised learning approach in which news articles are assigned category labels based on likelihood demonstrated by a training set of labeled articles. A system for automatic categorization of news articles into a standard set of categories has been implemented. The proposed work will use Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) term weighting scheme for optimization of classification techniques to get more optimized results and use two supervised learning approaches, i.e., Support Vector Machine (SVM) and K-Nearest neighbor (kNN) and compare the performances of both classifiers. Each news document is preprocessed and transformed into a term-document matrix (Tsoumakas et al. in Data mining and knowledge discovery handbook. Springer, Berlin, pp 667–685 (2010) [1]). After preprocessing and transforming each news article into a vector of weights, TF-IDF term weighting scheme was used for weighting the word. TF-IDF weighted the words calculating the number of words that appear in a document. An unknown news item is also transformed into a vector of keyword weights, and then categorized into suitable categories such as Sports, Business, and Science and Technology. The system purposed in research work was trained on the collection of approximately 300 categorized news articles extracted from the various Indian newspaper websites and tested on a different set of 60 randomly extracted news items from the same sources (Trstenjak et al. in Proc Eng 69:1356–1364 (2014) [2], Buana et al. Int J Comput Appl 50:37–42 [3]). It has been observed that the performances of both algorithms improve when TF-IDF approach is used.

Ubiquitous access to internet has resulted in more and more people going online to get their daily dose of news. In a 2010 survey conducted by the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, 41% of the respondents said they get most of their news online, 10% more than those who said they got most of their news from a newspaper. A lot of socio-technical factors have contributed to this phenomenal rise in adoption of online news in recent years. One of the biggest reasons why people are increasingly reading news online is because it facilitates discussion with peers (Nguyen 2010), offering different viewpoints which aid in forming a rounded personal opinion about the news story. The Pew survey found that 37% of online news users (and 51% of 18-29 year olds) think that commenting on news stories is an important feature to have. A lot of people tend to shape their opinion by reading discussion comments, reflective articles, blogs and even tweets about the news. Hence, an increasing number of people rely on online sources of news – be it news websites or news aggregator services like Digg, Reddit, Google Reader, Flipboard, Pulse etc. The problem with these news websites and aggregators is that the only way people can gather public opinion is by actively searching through the endless stream of comments and feeds, filtering out spam (which is a growing problem) and then reading the relevant posts. A top trending story on Twitter will typically see multiple tweets per second, and keeping up with the rapid flow of incoming tweets is quite cumbersome and cognitively taxing. Hence it becomes increasingly difficult and time consuming for someone who wants to get the pulse of the people affected by a news story. Furthermore, in certain scenarios people might want to look at more fine grained opinions. Currently, there is no elegant way to extract geographic and demographic impact of a news story. What is the public sentiment in Indonesia about the Arab Spring? How did the public opinion about the Wikileaks disclosures change as the story unfolded during the course of a year? It is very difficult and tedious to observe such patterns using the currently available news providers. This work attempts to solve these problems by proposing a news aggregator platform which pulls news stories from various sources and also aggregates public responses, reflections, opinions and sentiments associated with those stories. This data is presented in ways that are easily understandable so readers can make better sense of the stories unfolding across the globe. Such a news aggregator platform that gathers and display public opinion and sentiments about a story, must deal with various challenges – 1. Opinions are very subjective. Different people feel about a story in different ways. With such an enormous amount of diverse opinions and subjectivity, how can we possibly aggregate the responses into something that makes sense as a whole? ________________________________ Acknowledgements: Prof. Yardi, S. for the guidance Sethi, P. (2013). Public opinion aggregation by annotation and tagging of online news stories. iConference 2013 Proceedings (pp. 891-894). doi:10.9776/13453 Copyright is held by the author. iConference 2013 February 12-15, 2013 Fort Worth, TX, USA 892 2. There isn’t really a unified web standard for expressing opinion (in textual form). Some people tweet in 140 characters, while others write elaborate blog posts. Some websites employ tags which a reader can use to define and classify their public opinion, while others rely on threaded comments and comment ranking systems. How can a platform be flexible enough to adapt to all these varied standards so that it can extract valuable data from various sources? Perhaps the platform can create a new standard of expression on the web which is flexible and comprehensive enough to be used to express diverse views about every news story in the world. 3. How to filter out spam while extracting public opinion? 4. Once the platform has access to the data it needs, how should it be displayed to the reader in a way that makes sense? What forms of visualizations, illustrations and graphical representations can be employed to give the reader a holistic view of how people feel about a story? 5. How can the platform determine and convey effects of geographical, demographic and temporal variations as the story unfolds? These are just a few out of possibly many issues which must be dealt with. Previous research on similar public opinion aggregation services has greatly focused on natural language processing, data mining and text categorization and clustering. Xiaojun (2010) proposed a framework for crawling the web for comments and applying various data mining algorithms on the data to extract relevant information. Diakopoulos and Shamma (2010) used tweets posted in conjunction with the live presidential debate between Barack Obama and John McCain to gauge public opinion. Brody and Diakopoulos (2011) studied the use of word lengthening to detect sentiment in microblogs. This research proposes a solution – The Opinionated Reader, which relies on sentiment tags and annotations associated with a news story. The essential idea is to create a commenting, discussion and sharing plug-in which can be used by news websites and aggregators as a commenting solution for their news pages. Users wanting to share or comment on a news story through the plug-in are asked to tag the news story with sentiment tags and annotate the story with their reaction (happy/positive or sad/negative). These tags and annotations are stored, aggregated and linked to each news story. A mobile application provides the front-end interface for users to access the news stories and the aggregated sentiment associated with each story. The basic architecture is explained as follows: The Opinionated Reader – Mobile/Tablet App The app fetches news articles from various web sources, based on the interests and preferences configured by the user. In every news article, a portion of the screen real estate is reserved for Opinions which shows graphical visualizations and illustrations of the public opinion surrounding the news story. These visualizations include: A Sentiment Graph indicating the popular tags associated with the story (E.g.: “Shocking”, “Inspiring”, “Amusing” etc.). See Figure 1 for example visualization. A Positivity Graph which plots the level of positivity associated with the story on a time scale from when the news broke. See Figure 2 for example visualization. Figure 1. Example Sentiment Graph Figure 2. Example Positivity Graph iConference 2013 February 12-15, 2013 Fort Worth, TX, USA 893 The user can choose to see these visualizations for a particular time period in the evolution history of the news story, or for a specific country. The app also facilitates people to tag and annotate news articles from within its interface. The Opinionated Reader – Commenting and Sharing Web Plug-in These days, a common way of adding discussion and commenting functionality to news websites is by using 3 rd party services (like DISQUS). The Opinionated Reader is a similar service which can be embedded into the news articles of various news websites to enable commenting and sharing. When someone wishes to comment on an article, the comment is directed through this plug-in, which allows the users to annotate the article with the sentiment tags and reactions along with their comments. The Opinionated Reader saves this information along with the commenter’s location and date of comment (See Figure 3). Figure 3. The Opinionated Reader Web Plug-in 'Add Comment' dialog mockup The Opinionated Reader – Back-end The Back-end maintains a database of news items extracted from RSS feeds of various news websites. Each news article is linked with the sentiment tags and reaction/positivity annotations extracted from the comments and annotations gathered by the commenting plug-in. This data is used by the mobile/tablet app to generate visualizations (Sentiment Graph and Positivity Graph). The back-end also performs data mining on the tags and annotations for geographies and tracks the opinions across time. The back end system responds to queries received from the mobile app with the news story and associated tags and annotations, which are then rendered by the mobile app for the user. iConference 2013 February 12-15, 2013 Fort Worth, TX, USA 894 Discussion and Conclusion This design idea is still in a nascent state and has long hours of research, brainstorming, designing and development to go before it can be realized into something tangible. Twitter has grown exponentially in importance as a news source and it would be vastly valuable to integrate Twitter with The Opinionated Reader. Possibilities include use of special hash tags and natural language processing of tweets to extract public sentiment. The current design supports only two reaction annotations – positive and negative. Not every news story fits this annotation paradigm. Further research about human reactions to news stories might unveil interesting insights which would help zero in on a more robust annotation rubric. Lastly, since this service is envisioned to be non-curated and non-moderated, the value served by the app depends on the users themselves. Greater adoption will lead to more annotations and tags, which translates into a more accurate public opinion as presented to the user.

News recommender systems rely on rich textual information from news articles to generate user-specific recommendations. This reliance may expose these systems to potential vulnerabilities through textual attacks. To explore this vulnerability, we propose LANCE, a LArge language model-based News Content rEwriting framework, designed to influence news rankings and highlight the unintended promotion of manipulated news. LANCE consists of two key components: an explorer and a reflector. The explorer first generates rewritten news using diverse prompts, incorporating different writing styles, sentiments, and personas. We then collect these rewrites, evaluate their ranking impact within news recommender systems, and apply a filtering mechanism to retain effective rewrites. Next, the reflector fine-tunes an open-source LLM using the successful rewrites, enhancing its ability to generate more effective textual attacks. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of LANCE in manipulating rankings within news recommender systems. Unlike attacks in other recomendation domains, negative and neutral rewrites consistently outperform positive ones, revealing a unique vulnerability specific to news recommendation. Once trained, LANCE successfully attacks unseen news recommender systems (i.e., those for which LANCE received no information during training), highlighting its generalization ability and exposing shared vulnerabilities across different systems. Our work underscores the urgent need for research on textual attacks and paves the way for future studies on defense strategies.

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.

The human-animal relationship has changed from time to time with the evolution of cultural history. In the theoretical part of the study, a journey from being one or brother and sister to seeing the animal as an object and from there to be reduced to a means of healing traumas is described to the extent permitted by the dimensions of the article. The main stops in this evolution are emphasized, and the structural constructions of this relationship are analyzed. Following this analysis, the discourse analysis of the news articles was carried out. Through this analysis method, it was show what the real purpose of the news articles was and where this purposes tood in the evolution described in the theoretical part. After constructing the background of the article's narrative with qualitative-historical descriptions and interpretations in the theoretical part, discourse analysis was chosen as the method. Since the November 25th incident at the Konya Animal Shelter created a debate in a large segment of social institutions, four news articles from four newspapers covering the incident on the same day on the internet were selected and analyzed. The newspapers where the news items were published were identified based on their closeness to and opposition to the government. Findings on how the same news item was constructed were shown and interpreted. The attitude of the newspapers while reporting the event and the point in the evolution of the animal-human relationship were discussed. Thus, in the light of anthropological interpretations, this study has also revealed how animals are objectified in newspapers.

PurposeThis paper aims to examine the media coverage of a new reproductive benefit (oocyte cryopreservation) made available to employees at Apple and Facebook in 2014, in light of an ongoing public debate around the conflict experienced by women to be both “ideal workers” and “ideal mothers”.Design/methodology/approachThe study examines the coverage of the new benefit as a news item in major American newspapers and websites. It uses problem/solution frame analysis and provides a qualitative analysis of the leads, journalists’ rhetoric and sources found in 23 news articles on the topic. A rudimentary quantitative analysis of positive and negative solution evaluations is also included.FindingsAll the articles were found to use a problem/solution frame in their presentation of the new benefit as a news item. When biology is presented as at the root of the motherhood/career conflict, as it was by many journalists and their chosen sources, this logically leads to a biotechnological solution, such as egg-freezing. Other potential contributors to motherhood/career conflict, such as rigid and gendered career timelines and inadequate supports for working parents, are largely left out of the discussion – as are potential broader workplace and socio-cultural changes.Research limitations/implicationsThis study was limited to news articles only; the coverage of the issue in opinion pieces and in other media might have different findings. An experimentally designed study might lead to interesting findings on the impact of these framing elements (leads, rhetoric, sources) on readers’ responses to this topic.Originality/valueThis study contributes to research on the media coverage of motherhood and to management scholarship on gender, parenthood and work.

Recommender system is the system which, by using automated information filtering technology, recommends products or services to the customers who are likely to be interested in. Those systems are widely used in many different Web retailers such as Amazon.com, Netfix.com, and CDNow.com. Various recommender systems have been developed. Among them, Collaborative Filtering (CF) has been known as the most successful and commonly used approach. CF identifies customers whose tastes are similar to those of a given customer, and recommends items those customers have liked in the past. Numerous CF algorithms have been developed to increase the performance of recommender systems. However, the relative performances of CF algorithms are known to be domain and data dependent. It is very time-consuming and expensive to implement and launce a CF recommender system, and also the system unsuited for the given domain provides customers with poor quality recommendations that make them easily annoyed. Therefore, predicting in advance whether the performance of CF recommender system is acceptable or not is practically important and needed. In this study, we propose a decision making guideline which helps decide whether CF is adoptable for a given application with certain transaction data characteristics. Several previous studies reported that sparsity, gray sheep, cold-start, coverage, and serendipity could affect the performance of CF, but the theoretical and empirical justification of such factors is lacking. Recently there are many studies paying attention to Social Network Analysis (SNA) as a method to analyze social relationships among people. SNA is a method to measure and visualize the linkage structure and status focusing on interaction among objects within communication group. CF analyzes the similarity among previous ratings or purchases of each customer, finds the relationships among the customers who have similarities, and then uses the relationships for recommendations. Thus CF can be modeled as a social network in which customers are nodes and purchase relationships between customers are links. Under the assumption that SNA could facilitate an exploration of the topological properties of the network structure that are implicit in transaction data for CF recommendations, we focus on density, clustering coefficient, and centralization which are ones of the most commonly used measures to capture topological properties of the social network structure. While network density, expressed as a proportion of the maximum possible number of links, captures the density of the whole network, the clustering coefficient captures the degree to which the overall network contains localized pockets of dense connectivity. Centralization reflects the extent to which connections are concentrated in a small number of nodes rather than distributed equally among all nodes. We explore how these SNA measures affect the performance of CF performance and how they interact to each other. Our experiments used sales transaction data from H department store, one of the well?known department stores in Korea. Total 396 data set were sampled to construct various types of social networks. The dependant variable measuring process consists of three steps; analysis of customer similarities, construction of a social network, and analysis of social network patterns. We used UCINET 6.0 for SNA. The experiments conducted the 3-way ANOVA which employs three SNA measures as dependant variables, and the recommendation accuracy measured by F1-measure as an independent variable. The experiments report that 1) each of three SNA measures affects the recommendation accuracy, 2) the density's effect to the performance overrides those of clustering coefficient and centralization (i.e., CF adoption is not a good decision if the density is low), and 3) however though the density is low, the performance of CF is comparatively good when the clustering coefficient is low. We expect that these experiment results help firms decide whether CF recommender system is adoptable for their business domain with certain transaction data characteristics.

The explosive and continuous growth in the size and use of the World Wide Web is at the basis of the great interest into web usage mining techniques in both research and commercial areas. In particular, the need for predicting the user’s needs in order to improve the usability and user retention of a website is more than evident and can be addressed by personalization. In this thesis, we introduce a new framework that takes advantage of the sophisticated association rule finding web mining technology on both dynamic user activities over a website, such as navigational behavior, and static information, such as user profiles and web content. We also provide a novel personalization selection system which allows users to choose the most suitable profile for them in any given period of time. In order to examine the viability of our framework, we incorporate and implement it over a well designed simulation environment. Moreover, our experiment proves that our framework provides an overall better web personalization service in terms of both recommendation accuracy and user satisfaction.

Large number of Internet users in the Arab World uses the Internet as their main source of information. There are many news publishers and agencies that compete to gain the largest percentage of Arab visitors to their Web sites. Also these agencies received a continuous stream of news articles each day, and therefore there is a need for an automated system to identify new news items to inform the employee in these agencies about it, while this system has to neglect old news articles. This study demonstrates a novelty detection system, which used to identify the topic of each Arabic news item, besides identifying the novelty of each Arabic news item.

Given session-based news watch history of users, how can we precisely recommend news articles? Unlike other items for recommendation, the worth of news articles decays quickly and various news sources publish fresh ones every second. Moreover, people frequently select news articles regardless of their personal preferences to understand popular topics at a specific time. Conventional recommendation methods, designed for other recommendation domains, give low performance because of these peculiarities of news articles.In this paper, we propose PGT (News Recommendation Coalescing Personal and Global Temporal Preferences), an accurate news recommendation method designed with consideration of the above characteristics of news articles. PGT extracts latent features from both personal and global temporal preferences to sufficiently reflect users’ behaviors. Furthermore, we propose an attention based architecture to extract adequate coalesced features from both of the preferences. Experimental results show that PGT provides the most accurate news recommendation, giving the state-of-the-art accuracy.

An individual's location history in the real world implies his or her interests and behaviors. This paper analyzes and understands the process of Collaborative Filtering (CF) approach, which mines an individual's preference from his/her geographic location histories and recommends locations based on the similarities between the user and others. We find that a CF-based recommendation process can be summarized as a sequence of multiplications between a transition matrix and visited-location matrix. The transition matrix is usually approximated by the user's interest matrix that reflect the similarity among users, regarding to their interest in visiting different locations. The visited-location matrix provides the history of visited locations of all users, which is currently available to the recommendation system. We find that recommendation results will converge if and only if the transition matrix remains unchanged; otherwise, the recommendations will be valid for only a certain period of time. Based on our analysis, a novel location-based accurate recommendation (LAR) method is proposed, which considers the semantic meaning and category information of locations, as well as the timeliness of recommending results, to make accurate recommendations. We evaluated the precision and recall rates of LAR, using a large-scale real-world data set collected from Brightkite. Evaluation results confirm that LAR offers more accurate recommendations, comparing to the state-of-art approaches.

Research paper recommendation has been a hot research area for the last few decades. Thus far, numerous different paper recommendation approaches have been proposed. Some of these include methods based on metadata, content similarity, collaborative filtering, and citation analysis, among others. Citation analysis methods include bibliographic coupling and co-citation analysis. Much research has been done in the area of co-citation analysis. Researchers have also performed experiments using the proximity of in-text citations in co-citation analysis and have found that it improves the accuracy of paper recommendation. In co-citation analysis, the similarity is discovered based on the frequency of co-cited papers in different research papers and those citing papers may belong to different areas. However, when proximity is used to calculate co-citation, the accuracy of recommendations improves significantly. Bibliographic coupling finds bibliographic coupling strength based on the common references between two papers. In bibliographic coupling, a large number of common references of two papers means that they belong to the same area, unlike co-citation analysis, in which there is a possibility that the citing papers may belong to different areas. Based on the observation that with the use of proximity analysis the accuracy in cases of co-citation analysis has improved, this paper investigates if the accuracy of paper recommendation can be further improved by using proximity analysis in bibliographic coupling. This paper proposes an approach that extends the traditional bibliographic coupling by exploiting the proximity of in-text citations of bibliographically coupled articles. The proposed approach takes into account the proximity of in-text citations by clustering the in-text citations using a density-based algorithm called DBSCAN. Experiments on a data set of research papers are presented to show that there is a substantial increase in accuracy of the recommendations produced by DBSCAN based on proximity analysis of in-text citations compared to traditional bibliographic coupling and content-based approaches.