In this position paper, we present a research agenda and ideas for facilitating exposure to diverse viewpoints in news recommendation. Recommending news from diverse viewpoints is important to prevent potential filter bubble effects in news consumption, and stimulate a healthy democratic debate.To account for the complexity that is inherent to humans as citizens in a democracy, we anticipate (among others) individual-level differences in acceptance of diversity. We connect this idea to techniques in Natural Language Processing, where distributional language models would allow us to place different users and news articles in a multidimensional space based on semantic content, where diversity is operationalized as distance and variance. In this way, we can model individual “latitudes of diversity” for different users, and thus personalize viewpoint diversity in support of a healthy public debate. In addition, we identify technical, ethical and conceptual issues related to our presented ideas. Our investigation describes how NLP can play a central role in diversifying news recommendations.

Cognitive biases in the context of consuming online information filtered by recommender systems may lead to sub-optimal choices. One approach to mitigate such biases is through interface and interaction design. This survey reviews studies focused on cognitive bias mitigation of recommender system users during two processes: 1) item selection and 2) preference elicitation. It highlights a number of promising directions for Natural Language Generation research for mitigating cognitive bias including: the need for personalization, as well as for transparency and control.