Benchmarking News Recommendations in a Living Lab

Most user-centric studies of information access systems in literature suffer from unrealistic settings or limited numbers of users who participate in the study. In order to address this issue, the idea of a living lab has been promoted. Living labs allow us to evaluate research hypotheses using a large number of users who satisfy their information need in a real context. In this paper, we introduce a living lab on news recommendation in real time. The living lab has first been organized as News Recommendation Challenge at ACM RecSys’13 and then as campaign-style evaluation lab NEWSREEL at CLEF’14. Within this lab, researchers were asked to provide news article recommendations to millions of users in real time. Different from user studies which have been performed in a laboratory, these users are following their own agenda. Consequently, laboratory bias on their behavior can be neglected. We outline the living lab scenario and the experimental setup of the two benchmarking events. We argue that the living lab can serve as reference point for the implementation of living labs for the evaluation of information access systems

Recommender Systems

The ongoing rapid expansion of the Internet greatly increases the necessity of effective recommender systems for filtering the abundant information. Extensive research for recommender systems is conducted by a broad range of communities including social and computer scientists, physicists, and interdisciplinary researchers. Despite substantial theoretical and practical achievements, unification and comparison of different approaches are lacking, which impedes further advances. In this article, we review recent developments in recommender systems and discuss the major challenges. We compare and evaluate available algorithms and examine their roles in the future developments. In addition to algorithms, physical aspects are described to illustrate macroscopic behavior of recommender systems. Potential impacts and future directions are discussed. We emphasize that recommendation has a great scientific depth and combines diverse research fields which makes it of interests for physicists as well as interdisciplinary researchers.Comment: 97 pages, 20 figures (To appear in Physics Reports