"Beyond Optimizing for Clicks: Incorporating Editorial Values in News Recommendation" accepted at UMAP2020! • David Graus

The paper we wrote with former FD team mates Feng Lu and Anca Dumitrache has been accepted for publication as a long paper at UMAP 2020, the 28th Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization! (I fondly remember my last time at UMAP, in 2016 😏)

We have published a preprint of this paper, get it: here, or from arXiv.

F. Lu, A. Dumitrache, and D. Graus, “Beyond optimizing for clicks: incorporating editorial values in news recommendation,” in Proceedings of the 28th acm conference on user modeling, adaptation and personalization, New York, NY, USA, 2020, p. 145–153.
[Bibtex]

@inproceedings{lu2020beyond,
author = {Lu, Feng and Dumitrache, Anca and Graus, David},
title = {Beyond Optimizing for Clicks: Incorporating Editorial Values in News Recommendation},
year = {2020},
isbn = {9781450368612},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3340631.3394864},
doi = {10.1145/3340631.3394864},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 28th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization},
pages = {145–153},
numpages = {9},
keywords = {usefulness, news recommendation, editorial values},
location = {Genoa, Italy},
series = {UMAP ’20}
}

Update 08/05: Cool, @NickKivits mentioned our paper in his Villamedia column: “Het idee van de filterbubbel kan in de prullenbak“ and newsletter (with over 11k subscribers!)

I am particularly happy with this work because:

1️⃣ In our paper we show how you can align algorithm design across stakeholders (in this case: data scientists and journalists), by effectively modeling an editorial value (“dynamicness”) in the news recommender of Het Financieele Dagblad without losing accuracy.

2️⃣ We present (more) empirical proof that #recsys (can) offer(s) users *more* diverse, serendipitous, and dynamic lists of articles, compared to editorially curated lists, and hence (can) help in *avoiding*, not creating filter bubbles!

3️⃣ It is the perfect wrap-up of our Google DNI-funded “SMART Journalism” project at FD Mediagroep (we wrote most of the paper in our spare time after the project ended).