Operationalizing Framing to Support Multiperspective Recommendations of Opinion Pieces

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel computational method for enhancing viewpoint diversity in news recommendations by operationalizing framing, demonstrating its effectiveness through offline metrics and an online user study.

Contribution

It operationalizes framing from communication science to re-rank news recommendations for multiperspectivity, a novel approach in computational news diversity.

Findings

The proposed method increases viewpoint diversity in recommendation lists.

Users are willing to engage with viewpoint-diverse news recommendations.

Presentation characteristics significantly influence user engagement with diverse content.

Abstract

Diversity in personalized news recommender systems is often defined as dissimilarity, and based on topic diversity (e.g., corona versus farmers strike). Diversity in news media, however, is understood as multiperspectivity (e.g., different opinions on corona measures), and arguably a key responsibility of the press in a democratic society. While viewpoint diversity is often considered synonymous with source diversity in communication science domain, in this paper, we take a computational view. We operationalize the notion of framing, adopted from communication science. We apply this notion to a re-ranking of topic-relevant recommended lists, to form the basis of a novel viewpoint diversification method. Our offline evaluation indicates that the proposed method is capable of enhancing the viewpoint diversity of recommendation lists according to a diversity metric from literature. In an online study, on the Blendle platform, a Dutch news aggregator platform, with more than 2000 users, we found that users are willing to consume viewpoint diverse news recommendations. We also found that presentation characteristics significantly influence the reading behaviour of diverse recommendations. These results suggest that future research on presentation aspects of recommendations can be just as important as novel viewpoint diversification methods to truly achieve multiperspectivity in online news environments.