Location factor of recommender systems has been extensively studied in the past decade. However, there is no research thoroughly analyzing location’s role in news recommendation. In this paper, a comprehensive exploration on role of location in news recommendation is presented. First of all, based on analysis of real news datasets, we find that news recommendation differs from spatial item recommendation. Location affects news consumption behaviors of users with two-fold aspects including geographic feature and semantic feature. Regarding geographic feature, location influences news recommendation according to region rather than latitude-longitude level. Furthermore, interesting news topics are also impacted by semantic feature of location. Semantic feature may play a more positive role than geographic feature. The novel findings consistently manifest that, as non-spatial items, news differ from spatial items in that location influences users' selection in terms of different pattern and degree. In summary, geographic and semantic features influence reading preference through mapping locations into special topics. Changing of location topics leads to varying of reading preference. The news datasets in this paper belong to check in data. NewsREEL dataset is from a company, and it is provided by German researcher. The location data in Twitter dataset is also check in data. NetEase news dataset are collected from NetEase news websites, and the type of location data is city or region.

Event recommendation is an essential means to enable people to find attractive upcoming social events, such as party, exhibition, and concert. While growing line of research has focused on suggesting events to individuals, making event recommendation for a group of users has not been well studied. In this paper, we aim to recommend upcoming events for a group of users. We formalize group recommendation as a ranking problem and propose a group event recommendation framework GERF based on learning-to-rank technique. Specifically, we first analyze different contextual influences on user's event attendance, and extract preference of user to event considering each contextual influence. Then, the preference scores of the users in a group are taken as the features for learningto-rank to model the preference of the group. Moreover, a fast pairwise learning-to-rank algorithm, Bayesian group ranking, is proposed to learn ranking model for each group. Our framework is easily to incorporate additional contextual influences, and can be applied to other group recommendation scenarios. Extensive experiments have been conducted to evaluate the performance of GERF on two real-world datasets and demonstrate the appealing performance of our method on both accuracy and time efficiency.

News recommendation has become an essential way to help readers discover interesting stories. While a growing line of research has focused on modeling reading preferences for news recommendation, they neglect the instability of reader consumption behaviors, i.e., consumption behaviors of readers may be influenced by other factors in addition to user interests, which degrades the recommendation effectiveness of existing methods. In this article, we propose a probabilistic generative model, BoRe, where user interests and crowd effects are used to adapt to the instability of reader consumption behaviors, and reading sequences are utilized to adapt user interests evolving over time. Further, the extreme sparsity problem in the domain of news severely hinders accurately modeling user interests and reading sequences, which discounts BoRe’s ability to adapt to the instability. Accordingly, we leverage domain-specific features to model user interests in the situation of extreme sparsity. Meanwhile, we consider groups of users instead of individuals to capture reading sequences. Besides, we study how to reduce the computation to allow online application. Extensive experiments have been conducted to evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of BoRe on real-world datasets. The experimental results show the superiority of BoRe, compared with the state-of-the-art competing methods.