Optimising Beyond Accuracy

Tuning for Diversity and Novelty in Attention-based News Recommenders

This project implements and evaluates neural recommendation systems for news, with a focus on beyond-accuracy metrics such as diversity and novelty. Using the MIND dataset, it compares traditional and attention-based models, incorporating pre-trained language models (GloVe and BERT), and applies custom regularisation layers to encourage diverse and novel recommendations.

Key Features

• Custom-built bi-encoder architectures
• Integration of GloVe and fine-tuned BERT embeddings
• Training pipeline with hard-negative sampling
• Regularisation for Intra-List Diversity and Novelty
• Evaluation on both accuracy and beyond-accuracy metrics
• Statistical validation with t-tests and visualisations

Evaluation Metrics

Type	Metrics
Accuracy	AUC, MRR, nDCG@5, nDCG@10
Beyond-Accuracy	ILD, Surprisal, EPC, coverage

Installation Instructions

1. Clone the repository

git clone https://github.com/johannesvc/OptimisingBeyondAccuracy.git
cd OptimisingBeyondAccuracy

2. Install the requirements

pip install -r requirements.txt

3. Download the dataset

Download the MIND-small and/or MIND-large datasets from msnews.github.io, and place them in the .data/ directory.

4. Recreate Embedding Layers

To ensure reproducibility:

• Use the embeddings.ipynb to:
  • Build the GloVe lookup matrix
  • Fine-tune the BERT embeddings (bert-base-uncased) on titles
• Save the results to .npy format in the .data/ directory

Run Notebooks

All models are run from notebooks. Simply follow the steps and press run.

Results and Evaluation

After training, results (metrics and hyperparameters) are saved to results.json. Evaluation scripts are provided in the evaluation.ipynb notebook. These include:

• Accuracy vs diversity trade-offs
• Metric comparisons across model types
• All plots used in the main report

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Project Structure

.
├── baselines.ipynb     # Main baselines script
├── bi-bert.ipynb       # Documented training script using GloVe embeddings
├── bi-glove.ipynb      # Documented training script using BERT embeddings
├── bi-encoder.ipynb    # Main training script for hyperparameter tuning
├── CB.ipynb            # Content-based filtering baseline script
├── EDA.ipynb           # Exporatory Data Analysis and plotting
├── embeddings.ipynb    # Fine-tuning BERT + saving embeddings
├── evaluation.ipynb    # Evaluation scripts and plotting
├── README.md           # This file
├── model.png           # Diagram of model
├── recs
│   ├── bi_encoder.py   # Main training script
│   ├── data_loader.py  # Preprocessing and sequence generation
│   ├── __init__.py
│   ├── metrics.py      # Evaluation and plotting
│   ├── subclasses.py   # Model architectures and custom layers
│   └── utils.py        # Utils for logging
├── requirements.txt
└── results.json        # Output results for all models

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License

MIT License.

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Citation

If you reference or build upon this work, please cite it using the following:

@software{Van_Cauwenberghe_Optimising_Beyond_Accuracy_2025,
author = {Van Cauwenberghe, Johannes},
doi = {10.5281/zenodo.15322092},
license = {MIT},
month = apr,
title = {{Optimising Beyond Accuracy: Tuning for Diversity and Novelty in Attention-based News Recommenders}},
url = {https://github.com/JohannesVC/OptimisingBeyondAccuracy},
version = {1.0},
year = {2025}
}

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Acknowledgements

• MIND dataset by Microsoft Research
• GloVe embeddings by Stanford NLP
• BERT models via HuggingFace
• Inspired by Microsoft Recommenders and Transformers4Rec (Nvidia)