DebiasGAN: Eliminating Position Bias in News Recommendation with Adversarial Learning

News recommendation is important for improving news reading experience of users. Users' news click behaviors are widely used for inferring user interests and predicting future clicks. However, click behaviors are heavily affected by the biases brought by the positions of news displayed on the webpage. It is important to eliminate the effect of position biases on the recommendation model to accurately target user interests. In this paper, we propose a news recommendation method named DebiasGAN that can effectively eliminate the effect of position biases via adversarial learning. We use a bias-aware click model to capture the influence of position bias on click behaviors, and we use a bias-invariant click model with random candidate news positions to estimate the ideally unbiased click scores. We apply adversarial learning techniques to the hidden representations learned by the two models to help the bias-invariant click model capture the bias-independent interest of users on news. Experimental results on two real-world datasets show that DebiasGAN can effectively improve the accuracy of news recommendation by eliminating position biases

Personalized News Recommendation: A Survey

Personalized news recommendation is an important technique to help users find their interested news information and alleviate their information overload. It has been extensively studied over decades and has achieved notable success in improving users' news reading experience. However, there are still many unsolved problems and challenges that need to be further studied. To help researchers master the advances in personalized news recommendation over the past years, in this paper we present a comprehensive overview of personalized news recommendation. Instead of following the conventional taxonomy of news recommendation methods, in this paper we propose a novel perspective to understand personalized news recommendation based on its core problems and the associated techniques and challenges. We first review the techniques for tackling each core problem in a personalized news recommender system and the challenges they face. Next, we introduce the public datasets and evaluation methods for personalized news recommendation. We then discuss the key points on improving the responsibility of personalized news recommender systems. Finally, we raise several research directions that are worth investigating in the future. This paper can provide up-to-date and comprehensive views to help readers understand the personalized news recommendation field. We hope this paper can facilitate research on personalized news recommendation and as well as related fields in natural language processing and data mining