Overview of CLEF NEWSREEL 2014: News Recommendations Evaluation Labs

This paper summarises objectives, organisation, and results of the first news recommendation evaluation lab (NEWSREEL 2014). NEWSREEL targeted the evaluation of news recommendation algorithms in the form of a campaignstyle evaluation lab. Participants had the chance to apply two types of evaluation schemes. On the one hand, participants could apply their algorithms onto a data set. We refer to this setting as off-line evaluation. On the other hand, participants could deploy their algorithms on a server to interactively receive recommendation requests. We refer to this setting as on-line evaluation. This setting ought to reveal the actual performance of recommendation methods. The competition strived to illustrate differences between evaluation with historical data and actual users. The on-line evaluation does reflect all requirements which active recommender systems face in practise. These requirements include real-time responses and large-scale data volumes. We present the competition’s results and discuss commonalities regarding participants’ approaches