Veronica Liesaputra

Rongyao Wang, Veronica Liesaputra, Zhiyi Huang

News recommender systems are devised to alleviate the information overload, attracting more and more researchers' attention in recent years. The lack of a dedicated learner-oriented news recommendation toolkit hinders the advancement of research in news recommendation. We propose a PyTorch-based news recommendation toolkit called NewsTorch, developed to support learners in acquiring both conceptual understanding and practical experience. This toolkit provides a modular, decoupled, and extensible framework with a learner-friendly GUI platform that supports dataset downloading and preprocessing. It also enables training, validation, and testing of state-of-the-art neural news recommendation models with standardized evaluation metrics, ensuring fair comparison and reproducible experiments. Our open-source toolkit is released on Github: https://github.com/whonor/NewsTorch.

Rongyao Wang, Veronica Liesaputra, Zhiyi Huang

News recommender systems play a critical role in mitigating the information overload problem. In recent years, due to the successful applications of large language model technologies, researchers have utilized Discriminative Large Language Models (DLLMs) or Generative Large Language Models (GLLMs) to improve the performance of news recommender systems. Although several recent surveys review significant challenges for deep learning-based news recommender systems, such as fairness, privacy-preserving, and responsibility, there is a lack of a systematic survey on Large Language Model (LLM)-based news recommender systems. In order to review different core methodologies and explore potential issues systematically, we categorize DLLM-based and GLLM-based news recommender systems under the umbrella of LLM-based news recommender systems. In this survey, we first overview the development of deep learning-based news recommender systems. Then, we review LLM-based news recommender systems based on three aspects: news-oriented modeling, user-oriented modeling, and prediction-oriented modeling. Next, we examine the challenges from various perspectives, including datasets, benchmarking tools, and methodologies. Furthermore, we conduct extensive experiments to analyze how large language model technologies affect the performance of different news recommender systems. Finally, we comprehensively explore the future directions for LLM-based news recommendations in the era of LLMs.