The Intricacies of Time in News Recommendation

It is commonly accepted that time is a critical issue in news recommendation. As opposed to book or movie recommendations, news articles have extremely short life spans and should normally not be recommended after a few days. Most current news recommender systems use time as a decaying factor in ratings or just cut off older articles according to some simple mechanism. An experiment done on four different newspapers in Norway reveal that the time issue is somewhat more complicated. The life span of articles varies substantially from one newspaper to another, and from one category to another. Social media like Facebook may affect articles’ life span, though the influence of social media is highly category-dependent. CCS Concepts • Information systems➝Database management system engines • World Wide Web➝Traffic analysis, •Information Retrieval➝Recommender systems