Improving News Recommendations through Hybrid Sentiment Modelling and Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Kingenga, Eunice, Nkongolo, Mike Wa
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Kingenga, Eunice
Nkongolo, Mike Wa
author_facet Kingenga, Eunice
Nkongolo, Mike Wa
contents News recommendation systems rely on automated sentiment analysis to personalise content and enhance user engagement. Conventional approaches often struggle with ambiguity, lexicon inconsistencies, and limited contextual understanding, particularly in multi-source news environments. Existing models typically treat sentiment as a secondary feature, reducing their ability to adapt to users' affective preferences. To address these limitations, this study develops an adaptive, sentiment-aware news recommendation framework by integrating hybrid sentiment analysis with reinforcement learning. Using the BBC News dataset, a hybrid sentiment model combines VADER, AFINN, TextBlob, and SentiWordNet scores to generate robust article-level sentiment estimates. Articles are categorised as positive, negative, or neutral, and these sentiment states are embedded within a Q-learning architecture to guide the agent in learning optimal recommendation policies. The proposed system effectively identifies and recommends articles with aligned emotional profiles while continuously improving personalisation through iterative Q-learning updates. The results demonstrate that coupling hybrid sentiment modelling with reinforcement learning provides a feasible, interpretable, and adaptive approach for user-centred news recommendation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_02372
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Improving News Recommendations through Hybrid Sentiment Modelling and Reinforcement Learning
Kingenga, Eunice
Nkongolo, Mike Wa
Information Retrieval
News recommendation systems rely on automated sentiment analysis to personalise content and enhance user engagement. Conventional approaches often struggle with ambiguity, lexicon inconsistencies, and limited contextual understanding, particularly in multi-source news environments. Existing models typically treat sentiment as a secondary feature, reducing their ability to adapt to users' affective preferences. To address these limitations, this study develops an adaptive, sentiment-aware news recommendation framework by integrating hybrid sentiment analysis with reinforcement learning. Using the BBC News dataset, a hybrid sentiment model combines VADER, AFINN, TextBlob, and SentiWordNet scores to generate robust article-level sentiment estimates. Articles are categorised as positive, negative, or neutral, and these sentiment states are embedded within a Q-learning architecture to guide the agent in learning optimal recommendation policies. The proposed system effectively identifies and recommends articles with aligned emotional profiles while continuously improving personalisation through iterative Q-learning updates. The results demonstrate that coupling hybrid sentiment modelling with reinforcement learning provides a feasible, interpretable, and adaptive approach for user-centred news recommendation.
title Improving News Recommendations through Hybrid Sentiment Modelling and Reinforcement Learning
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02372