Do News Consumers Want Explanations for Personalized News Rankings?

Maartje ter Hoeve and Mathieu Heruer and Daan Odijk and Anne Schuth and Martijn Spitters and Ron Mulder and Nick van der Wildt and Maarten de Rijke. In Proceedings of FATREC'17, 2017.
45 citations

Abstract

To gain more insight in the question whether personalized news recommender systems should be responsible for their recommendations and transparent about their decisions, we study whether news consumers want explanations of why these news articles are recommended to them and what they find the best way to explain this. We survey users of Blendle’s news recommendation system, and from 120 respondents we learn that news consumers do want explanations, yet do not have a very strong preference for how explanations should be shown to them. Moreover, we perform an A/B test that shows that the open rate per user does not change if users are provided with reasons for the articles recommended for them. Most likely this is because users did not pay attention to the reasons.

Links

Do News Consumers Want Explanations for Personalized News Rankings?
https://doi.org/10.18122/B24D7N
Google Scholar

Supervised Student

Maartje ter Hoeve
MSc AI at the University of Amsterdam, 2017-2018

Related Talks

Impact of personalized recommendations on diversity - 45th EPRA Meeting. Edinburgh, Scotland. May 19, 2017.

Bib

@inproceedings{terhoeve2017,
  title = {Do News Consumers Want Explanations for Personalized News Rankings?},
  author = {Maartje ter Hoeve and Mathieu Heruer and Daan Odijk and Anne Schuth and Martijn Spitters and Ron Mulder and Nick van der Wildt and Maarten de Rijke},
  year = {2017},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of FATREC'17},
  doi = {10.18122/B24D7N}
}