Popular News Always Compete for the User's Attention! POPK: Mitigating Popularity Bias via a Temporal-Counterfactual

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Azevedo, Igor L. R., Suzumura, Toyotaro, Yasui, Yuichiro
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866917721556385792
author Azevedo, Igor L. R.
Suzumura, Toyotaro
Yasui, Yuichiro
author_facet Azevedo, Igor L. R.
Suzumura, Toyotaro
Yasui, Yuichiro
contents In news recommendation systems, reducing popularity bias is essential for delivering accurate and diverse recommendations. This paper presents POPK, a new method that uses temporal-counterfactual analysis to mitigate the influence of popular news articles. By asking, "What if, at a given time $t$, a set of popular news articles were competing for the user's attention to be clicked?", POPK aims to improve recommendation accuracy and diversity. We tested POPK on three different language datasets (Japanese, English, and Norwegian) and found that it successfully enhances traditional methods. POPK offers flexibility for customization to enhance either accuracy or diversity, alongside providing distinct ways of measuring popularity. We argue that popular news articles always compete for attention, even if they are not explicitly present in the user's impression list. POPK systematically eliminates the implicit influence of popular news articles during each training step. We combine counterfactual reasoning with a temporal approach to adjust the negative sample space, refining understanding of user interests. Our findings underscore how POPK effectively enhances the accuracy and diversity of recommended articles while also tailoring the approach to specific needs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_09939
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Popular News Always Compete for the User's Attention! POPK: Mitigating Popularity Bias via a Temporal-Counterfactual
Azevedo, Igor L. R.
Suzumura, Toyotaro
Yasui, Yuichiro
Information Retrieval
Information Theory
In news recommendation systems, reducing popularity bias is essential for delivering accurate and diverse recommendations. This paper presents POPK, a new method that uses temporal-counterfactual analysis to mitigate the influence of popular news articles. By asking, "What if, at a given time $t$, a set of popular news articles were competing for the user's attention to be clicked?", POPK aims to improve recommendation accuracy and diversity. We tested POPK on three different language datasets (Japanese, English, and Norwegian) and found that it successfully enhances traditional methods. POPK offers flexibility for customization to enhance either accuracy or diversity, alongside providing distinct ways of measuring popularity. We argue that popular news articles always compete for attention, even if they are not explicitly present in the user's impression list. POPK systematically eliminates the implicit influence of popular news articles during each training step. We combine counterfactual reasoning with a temporal approach to adjust the negative sample space, refining understanding of user interests. Our findings underscore how POPK effectively enhances the accuracy and diversity of recommended articles while also tailoring the approach to specific needs.
title Popular News Always Compete for the User's Attention! POPK: Mitigating Popularity Bias via a Temporal-Counterfactual
topic Information Retrieval
Information Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.09939