  Recommender systems help users deal with information overload by providing
tailored item suggestions to them. The recommendation of news is often
considered to be challenging, since the relevance of an article for a user can
depend on a variety of factors, including the user's short-term reading
interests, the reader's context, or the recency or popularity of an article.
Previous work has shown that the use of Recurrent Neural Networks is promising
for the next-in-session prediction task, but has certain limitations when only
recorded item click sequences are used as input. In this work, we present a
contextual hybrid, deep learning based approach for session-based news
recommendation that is able to leverage a variety of information types. We
evaluated our approach on two public datasets, using a temporal evaluation
protocol that simulates the dynamics of a news portal in a realistic way. Our
results confirm the benefits of considering additional types of information,
including article popularity and recency, in the proposed way, resulting in
significantly higher recommendation accuracy and catalog coverage than other
session-based algorithms. Additional experiments show that the proposed
parameterizable loss function used in our method also allows us to balance two
usually conflicting quality factors, accuracy and novelty.
  Keywords: Artificial Neural Networks, Context-Aware Recommender Systems,
Hybrid Recommender Systems, News Recommender Systems, Session-based
Recommendation
