Electronic Newspapers has become one sort of important communication medium with the rapid growth of audiences on Internet. In Taiwan, the majority of famous news media have their own Electronic Newspapers, which provide a large amount of online news. Though audiences can receive a mass of news, it is difficult for them to find the news in which they are really interested within limited time. Therefore, this current study focused on the research of the mechanism for filtering and recommending news based on the Use and Gratification Theory. The purposes were to develop a personalized news recommendation method for Electronic Newspapers and to examine the effect of the recommendation methods. The results of the empirical study showed that the system with recommendation mechanism was superior to the one with none in both usage performance and overall satisfaction. In this study, there were two recommendation mechanisms. One of them is time-based mechanism which refers to derive the interest automatically by analyzing how much time the audiences spent on reading news, the other is feedback-based mechanism which refers to derive the interest by asking audiences explicitly. It was found that there were no significant differences between the two mechanisms in either usage performance or overall satisfaction. Therefore, the time-based mechanism is helpful for audiences in finding personal news.

La motivation principale de cette thèse est de proposer un système de recommandation personnalisé pour les plateformes d’informations. Pour cela, nous avons démontré que les opinions peuvent constituer un descripteur efficace pour améliorer la qualité de la recommandation. Au cours de cette thèse, nous avons abordé ce problème en proposant trois contributions principales. Tout d’abord, nous avons proposé un modèle de profil qui décrit avec précision les intérêts des utilisateurs ainsi que le contenu des articles de presse. Le modèle de profil proposé repose sur trois éléments : les entités nommées, les aspects et les sentiments. Nous avons testé notre modèle de profil sur les trois applications différentes que sont l’identification des orientations politiques des utilisateurs, la recommandation personnalisée des articles de presse et enfin la diversification de la liste des articles recommandés. Deuxièmement, nous avons proposé une approche de classement des opinions permettant de filtrer et sélectionner seulement les opinions pertinentes. Pour cela, nous avons utilisé une variation de la technique de PageRank pour définir le score de chaque opinion. Les résultats montrent que notre approche surpasse deux approches récemment proposées pour le classement des opinions. Troisièmement, nous avons étudié différentes façons d’enrichir le contenu des articles de presse par les opinions : par toutes les opinions, par seulement le topk des opinions, et enfin par un ensemble d’opinions diversifiées. Les résultats montrent que l’enrichissement des contenus des articles de presse / In this thesis, we have investigated how to exploit user-generated-content for personalized news recommendation purpose. The intuition behind this line of research is that the opinions provided by users, on news websites, represent a strong indicator about their profiles. We have addressed this problem by proposing three main contributions. Firstly, we have proposed a profile model that accurately describes both users’ interests and news article contents. The profile model was tested on three different applications ranging from identifying the political orientation of users to the context of news recommendation and the diversification of the list of recommended news articles. Results show that our profile model give much better results compared to state-of-the-art models. Secondly, we have investigated the problem of noise on opinions and how we can retrieve only relevant opinions in response to a given query.The proposed opinion ranking strategy is based on users’ debates features. We have used a variation of PageRank technique to define the score of each opinion. Results show that our approach outperforms two recent proposed opinions ranking strategies, particularly for controversial topics. Thirdly, we have investigated different ways of leveraging opinions on news article contents including all opinions, topk opinions based on opinion ranking strategy, and a set of diverse opinion. To extract a list of diverse opinions, we have employed a variation of an existing opinion diversification model. Results show that diverse opinions give the best performance over other leveraging strategies.

La motivation principale de cette thèse est de proposer un système de recommandation personnalisé pour les plateformes d’informations. Pour cela, nous avons démontré que les opinions peuvent constituer un descripteur efficace pour améliorer la qualité de la recommandation. Au cours de cette thèse, nous avons abordé ce problème en proposant trois contributions principales. Tout d’abord, nous avons proposé un modèle de profil qui décrit avec précision les intérêts des utilisateurs ainsi que le contenu des articles de presse. Le modèle de profil proposé repose sur trois éléments : les entités nommées, les aspects et les sentiments. Nous avons testé notre modèle de profil sur les trois applications différentes que sont l’identification des orientations politiques des utilisateurs, la recommandation personnalisée des articles de presse et enfin la diversification de la liste des articles recommandés. Deuxièmement, nous avons proposé une approche de classement des opinions permettant de filtrer et sélectionner seulement les opinions pertinentes. Pour cela, nous avons utilisé une variation de la technique de PageRank pour définir le score de chaque opinion. Les résultats montrent que notre approche surpasse deux approches récemment proposées pour le classement des opinions. Troisièmement, nous avons étudié différentes façons d’enrichir le contenu des articles de presse par les opinions : par toutes les opinions, par seulement le topk des opinions, et enfin par un ensemble d’opinions diversifiées. Les résultats montrent que l’enrichissement des contenus des articles de presse / In this thesis, we have investigated how to exploit user-generated-content for personalized news recommendation purpose. The intuition behind this line of research is that the opinions provided by users, on news websites, represent a strong indicator about their profiles. We have addressed this problem by proposing three main contributions. Firstly, we have proposed a profile model that accurately describes both users’ interests and news article contents. The profile model was tested on three different applications ranging from identifying the political orientation of users to the context of news recommendation and the diversification of the list of recommended news articles. Results show that our profile model give much better results compared to state-of-the-art models. Secondly, we have investigated the problem of noise on opinions and how we can retrieve only relevant opinions in response to a given query.The proposed opinion ranking strategy is based on users’ debates features. We have used a variation of PageRank technique to define the score of each opinion. Results show that our approach outperforms two recent proposed opinions ranking strategies, particularly for controversial topics. Thirdly, we have investigated different ways of leveraging opinions on news article contents including all opinions, topk opinions based on opinion ranking strategy, and a set of diverse opinion. To extract a list of diverse opinions, we have employed a variation of an existing opinion diversification model. Results show that diverse opinions give the best performance over other leveraging strategies.

Sistemas de Recomendação (SR) são softwares capazes de sugerir itens aos usuários com base no histórico de interações de usuários ou por meio de métricas de similaridade que podem ser comparadas por item, usuário ou ambos. Existem diferentes tipos de SR e dentre os que despertam maior interesse deste trabalho estão: SR baseados em conteúdo; SR baseados em conhecimento; e SR baseado em filtro colaborativo. Alcançar resultados adequados às expectativas dos usuários não é uma meta simples devido à subjetividade inerente ao comportamento humano, para isso, SR precisam de soluções eficientes e eficazes para: modelagem dos dados que suportarão a recomendação; recuperação da informação que descrevem os dados; combinação dessas informações dentro de métricas de similaridade, popularidade ou adequabilidade; criação de modelos descritivos dos itens sob recomendação; e evolução da inteligência do sistema de forma que ele seja capaz de aprender a partir da interação com o usuário. A tomada de decisão por um sistema de recomendação é uma tarefa complexa que pode ser implementada a partir da visão de áreas como inteligência artificial e mineração de dados. Dentro da área de inteligência artificial há estudos referentes ao método de raciocínio baseado em casos e da recomendação baseada em casos. No que diz respeito à área de mineração de dados, os SR podem ser construídos a partir de modelos descritivos e realizar tratamento de dados textuais, constituindo formas de criar elementos para compor uma recomendação. Uma forma de minimizar os pontos fracos de uma abordagem, é a adoção de aspectos baseados em uma abordagem híbrida, que neste trabalho considera-se: tirar proveito dos diferentes tipos de SR; usar técnicas de resolução de problemas; e combinar recursos provenientes das diferentes fontes para compor uma métrica unificada a ser usada para ranquear a recomendação por relevância. Dentre as áreas de aplicação dos SR, destaca-se a recomendação de notícias, sendo utilizada por um público heterogêneo, amplo e exigente por relevância. Neste contexto, a presente pesquisa apresenta uma abordagem híbrida para recomendação de notícias construída por meio de uma arquitetura implementada para provar os conceitos de um sistema de recomendação. Esta arquitetura foi validada por meio da utilização de um corpus de notícias e pela realização de um experimento online. Por meio do experimento foi possível observar a capacidade da arquitetura em relação aos requisitos de um sistema de recomendação de notícias e também confirmar a hipótese no que se refere à privilegiar recomendações com base em similaridade, popularidade, diversidade, novidade e serendipidade. Foi observado também uma evolução nos indicadores de leitura, curtida, aceite e serendipidade conforme o sistema foi acumulando histórico de preferências e soluções. Por meio da análise da métrica unificada para ranqueamento foi possível confirmar sua eficácia ao verificar que as notícias melhores colocadas no ranqueamento foram as mais aceitas pelos usuários / Recommendation Systems (RS) are software capable of suggesting items to users based on the history of user interactions or by similarity metrics that can be compared by item, user, or both. There are different types of RS and those which most interest in this work are content-based, knowledge-based and collaborative filtering. Achieving adequate results to user\'s expectations is a hard goal due to the inherent subjectivity of human behavior, thus, the RS need efficient and effective solutions to: modeling the data that will support the recommendation; the information retrieval that describes the data; combining this information within similarity, popularity or suitability metrics; creation of descriptive models of the items under recommendation; and evolution of the systems intelligence to learn from the user\'s interaction. Decision-making by a RS is a complex task that can be implemented according to the view of fields such as artificial intelligence and data mining. In the artificial intelligence field there are studies concerning the method of case-based reasoning that works with the principle that if something worked in the past, it may work again in a new similar situation the one in the past. The case-based recommendation works with structured items, represented by a set of attributes and their respective values (within a ``case\'\' model), providing known and adapted solutions. Data mining area can build descriptive models to RS and also handle, manipulate and analyze textual data, constituting one option to create elements to compose a recommendation. One way to minimize the weaknesses of an approach is to adopt aspects based on a hybrid solution, which in this work considers: taking advantage of the different types of RS; using problem-solving techniques; and combining resources from different sources to compose a unified metric to be used to rank the recommendation by relevance. Among the RS application areas, news recommendation stands out, being used by a heterogeneous public, ample and demanding by relevance. In this context, the this work shows a hybrid approach to news recommendations built through a architecture implemented to prove the concepts of a recommendation system. This architecture has been validated by using a news corpus and by performing an online experiment. Through the experiment it was possible to observe the architecture capacity related to the requirements of a news recommendation system and architecture also related to privilege recommendations based on similarity, popularity, diversity, novelty and serendipity. It was also observed an evolution in the indicators of reading, likes, acceptance and serendipity as the system accumulated a history of preferences and solutions. Through the analysis of the unified metric for ranking, it was possible to confirm its efficacy when verifying that the best classified news in the ranking was the most accepted by the users

Sistemas de Recomendação (SR) são softwares capazes de sugerir itens aos usuários com base no histórico de interações de usuários ou por meio de métricas de similaridade que podem ser comparadas por item, usuário ou ambos. Existem diferentes tipos de SR e dentre os que despertam maior interesse deste trabalho estão: SR baseados em conteúdo; SR baseados em conhecimento; e SR baseado em filtro colaborativo. Alcançar resultados adequados às expectativas dos usuários não é uma meta simples devido à subjetividade inerente ao comportamento humano, para isso, SR precisam de soluções eficientes e eficazes para: modelagem dos dados que suportarão a recomendação; recuperação da informação que descrevem os dados; combinação dessas informações dentro de métricas de similaridade, popularidade ou adequabilidade; criação de modelos descritivos dos itens sob recomendação; e evolução da inteligência do sistema de forma que ele seja capaz de aprender a partir da interação com o usuário. A tomada de decisão por um sistema de recomendação é uma tarefa complexa que pode ser implementada a partir da visão de áreas como inteligência artificial e mineração de dados. Dentro da área de inteligência artificial há estudos referentes ao método de raciocínio baseado em casos e da recomendação baseada em casos. No que diz respeito à área de mineração de dados, os SR podem ser construídos a partir de modelos descritivos e realizar tratamento de dados textuais, constituindo formas de criar elementos para compor uma recomendação. Uma forma de minimizar os pontos fracos de uma abordagem, é a adoção de aspectos baseados em uma abordagem híbrida, que neste trabalho considera-se: tirar proveito dos diferentes tipos de SR; usar técnicas de resolução de problemas; e combinar recursos provenientes das diferentes fontes para compor uma métrica unificada a ser usada para ranquear a recomendação por relevância. Dentre as áreas de aplicação dos SR, destaca-se a recomendação de notícias, sendo utilizada por um público heterogêneo, amplo e exigente por relevância. Neste contexto, a presente pesquisa apresenta uma abordagem híbrida para recomendação de notícias construída por meio de uma arquitetura implementada para provar os conceitos de um sistema de recomendação. Esta arquitetura foi validada por meio da utilização de um corpus de notícias e pela realização de um experimento online. Por meio do experimento foi possível observar a capacidade da arquitetura em relação aos requisitos de um sistema de recomendação de notícias e também confirmar a hipótese no que se refere à privilegiar recomendações com base em similaridade, popularidade, diversidade, novidade e serendipidade. Foi observado também uma evolução nos indicadores de leitura, curtida, aceite e serendipidade conforme o sistema foi acumulando histórico de preferências e soluções. Por meio da análise da métrica unificada para ranqueamento foi possível confirmar sua eficácia ao verificar que as notícias melhores colocadas no ranqueamento foram as mais aceitas pelos usuários / Recommendation Systems (RS) are software capable of suggesting items to users based on the history of user interactions or by similarity metrics that can be compared by item, user, or both. There are different types of RS and those which most interest in this work are content-based, knowledge-based and collaborative filtering. Achieving adequate results to user\'s expectations is a hard goal due to the inherent subjectivity of human behavior, thus, the RS need efficient and effective solutions to: modeling the data that will support the recommendation; the information retrieval that describes the data; combining this information within similarity, popularity or suitability metrics; creation of descriptive models of the items under recommendation; and evolution of the systems intelligence to learn from the user\'s interaction. Decision-making by a RS is a complex task that can be implemented according to the view of fields such as artificial intelligence and data mining. In the artificial intelligence field there are studies concerning the method of case-based reasoning that works with the principle that if something worked in the past, it may work again in a new similar situation the one in the past. The case-based recommendation works with structured items, represented by a set of attributes and their respective values (within a ``case\'\' model), providing known and adapted solutions. Data mining area can build descriptive models to RS and also handle, manipulate and analyze textual data, constituting one option to create elements to compose a recommendation. One way to minimize the weaknesses of an approach is to adopt aspects based on a hybrid solution, which in this work considers: taking advantage of the different types of RS; using problem-solving techniques; and combining resources from different sources to compose a unified metric to be used to rank the recommendation by relevance. Among the RS application areas, news recommendation stands out, being used by a heterogeneous public, ample and demanding by relevance. In this context, the this work shows a hybrid approach to news recommendations built through a architecture implemented to prove the concepts of a recommendation system. This architecture has been validated by using a news corpus and by performing an online experiment. Through the experiment it was possible to observe the architecture capacity related to the requirements of a news recommendation system and architecture also related to privilege recommendations based on similarity, popularity, diversity, novelty and serendipity. It was also observed an evolution in the indicators of reading, likes, acceptance and serendipity as the system accumulated a history of preferences and solutions. Through the analysis of the unified metric for ranking, it was possible to confirm its efficacy when verifying that the best classified news in the ranking was the most accepted by the users