Nowadays, many news consumers are overwhelmed by an explosion of content which they have access to, clearly motivating the need for assistance in finding the right content at the right time. On the other hand, media companies, including news publishers, struggle to get the right content in an effective way to the right consumers: they don’t have the resources nor the right scale to build and integrate effective content personalisation systems.
The objective of CPN is to provide a platform delivering a set of services allowing both large and small media companies to target the delivery of news in the right format at the right time to the media consumer.
In Year 1, the vision of the project was defined. Following this vision, several scenarios & use cases have been defined. These use cases then allowed the consortium to define the technical & user requirements for setting up the recommender and the technical platform. In Year 2, the consortium worked hard on improving the platform infrastructure and developing the technology bricks that had been defined. These features were carefully implemented and linked to the recommender framework.
During the final year of the project, focus has been put on improving the recommendation engine as well as the front-end modules. This was done by means of online & offline testing.
These technical improvements were then extensively tested during a one-month pilot with a big group of users. The set-up, evaluation methodology & recruitment for this pilot was carefully addressed. An open pilot was conducted, meaning that there was no fixed start and end date for the testers, with almost 5000 testers. These readers were able to read their personalised article stream via the CPN app (DW & DIAS content), via the DIAS website or via the VRT MYNWS app.
The user satisfaction has been measured by means of click data analysis & regular surveys, which lead to interesting conclusions.
Finally, the consortium also focused on the dissemination and exploitation of the services developed along the project. As organizing a final live event to share the project results was no longer possible due to Covid-19 regulations, a webinar called “Trust, Transparency and Personalisation – Building deeper relationships with your readers” was organized in May.
