The role of user profiles for news filtering

Abstract

Most online news sources are electronic versions of "ink-on-paper" newspapers.These are versions that have been filtered, from the mass of news produced each day, by an editorial board with a given community profile in mind. As readers, we choose the filter rather than choose the stories. New technology, however, provides the potential for personalized versions to be filtered automatically from this mass of news on the basis of user profiles.People read the news for many reasons: to find out "what's going on", to be knowledgeable members of a community, and because the activity itself is pleasurable.Given this, we ask the question, "How much filtering is acceptable to readers?"In this study, an evaluation of user preference for personal editions vs. community editions of online news was performed. A personalized edition of a local newspaper was created for each subject based on an elliptical model that combined the user profile and community profile as represented by the full edition of the local newspaper. The amount of emphasis given the user profile and the community profile was varied to test the subjects' reactions to different amounts of personalized filtering. The task was simply, "read the news", rather than any subject specific information retrieval task. The results indicate that users prefer the coarse-grained community filters to fine-grained personalized filters.

Capturing the change in topical interests of personas over time

“…As an example of these efforts, Watters and Wang () extract feature phrases from news content. However, it seems that people prefer a combination of personalization and serendipitous content (Shepherd, Duffy, Watters, & Gugle, ), indicating, perhaps, that audiences are interested in new types of content or tire when being exposed to the same topics over time. Therefore, efforts have also focused on modeling audience preferences over time, including efforts based on similarity among audience members (Lv, Meng, & Zhang, ) or specific aspects of the content, such as entity identification (Zhang, Boons, & Batista‐Navarro, ).…”

Genre characteristics - a front page analysis of 85 Swedish online newspapers

“…those that have exploited the media the most. To further describe the genre as a base for the forthcoming longitudinal study, we used the visual pattern [8] and the definition of broadsheet metaphor [19]. Schmid-Isler [8] divides the visual pattern of a traditional newspaper front page into: a) the name of the newspaper -the brand, b) the number of columns, c) headings, d) photographs and e) table of contents (often to the left).…”

“…The broadsheet metaphor is described as "a newspaper layout of text and photographs… integrated into a coherent presentation" [19, p.151]. When referring to the broadsheet metaphor we include both the descriptions of Schmid-Isler [8] and Shepherd et al [19].…”

Combining article content and Web usage for literature recommendation in digital libraries

“…In addition, interest profiles may change over time. It has been shown that interest profiles explicitly contributed by users often result in less accurate document selection than stereotyped interest profiles (Shepherd et al, 2001;Kuflik et al, 2003). A body of research exist that address the problem of automatic generation of interest profiles from users' (explicit or implicit) relevance feedback on some selected documents.…”