Document Type

Article

Publication Date

October 2017

Publication Title

New Generation Computing

Volume

35

Issue Number

4

First Page

417

Last Page

450

DOI

10.1007/s00354-017-0019-x

ISSN

1882-7055

Abstract

Social media is rapidly becoming the main source of news consumption for users, raising significant challenges to news aggregation and recommendation tasks. One of these challenges concerns the recommendation of very recent news. To tackle this problem, approaches to the prediction of news popularity have been proposed. In this paper, we study the task of predicting news popularity upon their publication, when social feedback is unavailable or scarce, and to use such predictions to produce news rankings. Unlike previous work, we focus on accurately predicting highly popular news. Such cases are rare, causing known issues for standard prediction models and evaluation metrics. To overcome such issues we propose the use of resampling strategies to bias learners towards these rare cases of highly popular news, and a utility-based framework for evaluating their performance. An experimental evaluation is performed using real-world data to test our proposal in distinct scenarios. Results show that our proposed approaches improve the ability of predicting and recommending highly popular news upon publication, in comparison to previous work.

Comments

This is a post-peer-review, pre-copyedit version of an article published in New Generation Computing, Volume 35, Issue 4, 2017. The final authenticated version is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00354-017-0019-x
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