Fighting Filterbubbles with Adversarial BERT-Training for News-Recommendation

Lukas Pfahler, Katharina Morik

Keywords: Adversarial Learning, Natural Language Processing, BERT, News Recommendation, Attention

Abstract:

Recommender engines play a role in the emergence and reinforcement of filter bubbles. When these systems learn that a user prefers content from a particular site, the user will be less likely to be exposed to different sources or opinions and, ultimately, is more likely to develop extremist tendencies.
We trace the roots of this phenomenon to the way the recommender engine represents news articles. The vectorial features modern systems extract from the plain text of news articles are already highly predictive of the associated news outlet. We propose a new training scheme based on adversarial machine learning to tackle this issue . Our experiments show that the features we can extract this way are significantly less predictive of the news outlet and thus offer the possibility to reduce the risk of manifestation of new filter bubbles. We validate our intuitions in a news recommendation task using a recent attention-based recommendation system.

One-sentence Summary: In order to fight the emergence of filterbubbles in news recommendation systems, we use adversarial training to learn representations of news articles that are less predictive of their respective news outlet.

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Reviewed Version (pdf): https://openreview.net/references/pdf?id=MQW82nnN9E