Impressions from the 10th INRA workshop at SIGIR 2022

Author: Andreas Lommatzsch

The 10th edition of the International Workshop on News Recommendation and Analytics (INRA 2022) has been held at July 15th, 2022, as a hybrid SIGIR workshop in Madrid, Spain.
The INRA workshop provides a platform for recent research and discussions in the domain of news and recommender algorithms.
Over last years the relevance of news has increased what resulted in a big interest in the analysis in the production, personalization, presentation, and consumption of news.
Due to popular internet portals and social media, news are ubiquitous.
The personalization and context-aware adaptation also resulted in new challenges such as extended user profiling, filter bubbles and echo chambers as well as fake news.

These challenges are reflected in this year’s workshop program consisting of research presentations, invited talks and a panel discussion.
The talks covered a broad spectrum of news related challenges. I would highlight here three presenations:
1. Lucas Möller presented his work researching different scoring functions for evaluating neural content-based filtering. The paper shows that the optimized non-linear combinations of user-based and item-based criteria improves the recommender performance.
2. An invited presentation explained the relevance of images for the perception of news articles. The talk gave an overview on the results of MediaEval NewsImages 2021 and presented the special challenges in the NewsImages task 2022.
3. Srivas Prasad presented the challenges of news article publishing and filtering from the industry perspective. He discussed the problem of detecting relevant information in social media and delivering reliable, valuable information in real time.

Looking back on the workshop day, it was a day full with interesting presentations and good discussions.
The workshop proceedings will we published on CEUR-WS.org soon.
Extended papers could also be submitted to the Special Issue on News Personalization and Analytics of The Journal of Personalization Research (UMUAI).

Due to the positive feedback we got for the workshop, we plan to continue the workshop series also in 2023.