Shift your Focus for the Greater Good: Improving Fairness at no cost for Accuracy and Diversity in News Recommender Systems

In today’s digital landscape, recommender systems assist users in navigating the vast amount of available data. Within the realm of information access, a subset of such systems called News Recommender Systems help users find news content that interests them. However, by prioritizing traditional accuracy-focused optimization, these systems contribute to the formation of filter bubbles, restricting users’ exposure to diverse viewpoints and exacerbating polarization. To address this issue, beyond-accuracy factors like diversity have been integrated into recommendation. Yet, such approaches can be ineffective and even unintentionally influence user opinions. This raises major ethical concerns as systems lack the legitimacy to shape opinions. This article presents the ADF framework, a novel approach designed to optimize accuracy, diversity, and fairness simultaneously. Unlike conventional models that manage fairness in a tradeoff, ADF establishes fairness as a core constraint. The framework relies on an innovative fairness-constrained diversification strategy, ensuring that users are exposed to a broader range of opinions, without being oriented toward specific viewpoints. ADF is adaptable to various diversity metrics and provides personalized diversification, independent of the underlying recommendation algorithms. Through real-world benchmark datasets and multiple recommendation models, experimental evaluation confirmed that ADF limits the impact on accuracy, enhances diversity, and crucially upholds fairness.