No abstract

The proliferation of online news creates a need for filtering interesting articles. Compared to other products, however, recommending news has specific challenges: news preferences are subject to trends, users do not want to see multiple articles with similar content, and frequently we have insufficient information to profile the reader.In this paper, we introduce a class of news recommendation systems based on context trees. They can provide highquality news recommendations to anonymous visitors based on present browsing behaviour. Using an unbiased testing methodology, we show that they make accurate and novel recommendations, and that they are sufficiently flexible for the challenges of news recommendation.

No abstract

We investigate how metrics that can be measured offline can be used to predict the online performance of recommender systems, thus avoiding costly A-B testing. In addition to accuracy metrics, we combine diversity, coverage, and serendipity metrics to create a new performance model. Using the model, we quantify the trade-off between different metrics and propose to use it to tune the parameters of recommender algorithms without the need for online testing. Another application for the model is a self-adjusting algorithm blend that optimizes a recommender's parameters over time. We evaluate our findings on data and experiments from news websites.

Abstract-Because of the abundance of news on the web, news recommendation is an important problem. We compare three approaches for personalized news recommendation: collaborative filtering at the level of news items, content-based system recommending items with similar topics, and a hybrid technique.We observe that recommending items according to the topic profile of the current browsing session seems to give poor results. Although news articles change frequently and thus data about their popularity is sparse, collaborative filtering applied to individual articles provides the best results.