ePaper - the Personalized Mobile Newspaper
Bracha Shapira, Peretz Shoval, Joachim Meyer, Noam Tractinsky, Dudu Mimran
Deutsche Telekom Laboratories at Ben-Gurion University
P.O.B. 653, Beer-Sheva, Israel
bshapira@bgu.ac.il, shoval@bgu.ac.il, Joachim@bgu.ac.il, noamt@bgu.ac.il,
dudu@strategicboard.com
ABSTRACT
This paper provides an overview of the ePaper project. The
project aims to provide an end-to-end solution for the future
mobile personalized newspaper. The ePaper aggregates
content (i.e., news items) from various news providers, and
delivers personalized newspapers on dedicated mobile,
electronic newspaper-like, devices. The ePaper can provide
to each subscribed user a personalized newspaper,
according to the user's preferences, as well as a "standard
edition" of a selected newspaper. The layout of the
newspaper is adapted to the device's specifications and the
user's preferences. The ePaper is expected to change the
reading experience of newspapers and magazines, coupling
innovative paper-like display with novel personalization
algorithms, intuitive interface and new adaptation methods
of content to device.
Author Keywords
Electronic newspaper, collaborative filtering, ontology-
content-based filtering, personalization.
ACM Classification Keywords
H5.2. Information interfaces and presentation, H.3.3.
Information Storage and Retrieval; information filtering,
H.3.1. Content Analysis and Indexing.
1. INTRODUCTION
The publishing world is undergoing a digital revolution.
After decades in the laboratory, electronic paper
technologies seem posed for commercialization starting as
early as 2006. Electronic paper based on e-ink technology
offers a visual impression close to print on paper, being
very thin; readable, and consuming power only when
updating the screen. The result is a reading experience that
is similar to paper - high contrast, high resolution, viewable
in direct sunlight and at a nearly 180-degree angle.
The ePaper project, performed at the Deutsche Telekom
Laboratories at Ben-Gurion University, aims at providing
an end–to-end solution for the future newspaper, targeting
the above mentioned electronic paper devices. The ePaper
is not meant to be another application on a PDA or mobile
phone. Rather, it is projected as a substitute to the
newspaper that is run on a medium-format portable digital
device, with several notable advantages over a paper
newspaper, such as the possibility to provide up-to-date
information, aggregate news items from many news
providers, easy browsing and navigation, and a
personalized edition that best fits each user's preferences.
The ePaper system is a client-server application that
provides an end-to-end solution for newspaper reading. On
the server side, the ePaper includes aggregation and
classification of news from multiple sources, flexible
delivering services, personalization and content adaptation.
On the client side, readers enjoy intuitive interface enabling
easy navigation and browsing and advanced content
adaptation capabilities, enabling the reader to switch and
configure layouts.
The rest of this paper is structured as follows: Section 2
describes some related projects; Section 3 presents the
ePaper general architecture; Section 4 elaborates on the
novel personalization and content adaptation algorithms.
Section 5 concludes with the status of the project and future
issues.
2. RELATED WORK
The digital revolution of the publishing industry and
specifically the digitization of newspapers have gained lot
of research attention and is the subject of many recent
studies and projects. We briefly mention here some of the
main recent projects.
The Electronic Newspaper Initiative [1, 2] is aimed at
producing an advanced multimedia news electronic
newspaper. It provides personalization of news, and
allowing interactive features like multimedia news on
demand. One of the main goals of ELIN was to develop an
authoring tool for journalists and editors of news that are
using the MPEG-4 and MPEG-7 standards. The scope of
the ePaper system does not include authoring tools.
However, ePaper is flexible in terms of the news items
format. The ePaper design consists of interpreters that
might be added for every known format that a publisher
wishes to use without forcing them to adopt a specific
standard (like the MPEG framework). ELIN is aimed
mainly for users at home, who use PC-based devices. In the
ELIN context mobile devices are mainly used to send news
related SMS and MMS. The ePaper is targeted to dedicated
e-ink mobile devices, considering their limited capabilities.
Personalization of contents in the ELIN project is based
mainly on rather basic, collaborative, memory-based
algorithms that are known to have scalability disadvantages.
They consider the enhancement and improvement of the
filtering and personalization algorithms as an issue for their
future developments. The ePaper personalization engine
integrates ontology-driven content-based and novel
collaborative filtering algorithms to provide high quality
personalization of content.
MINDS project (Mobile Information and News Data
Services) for 3G (http://www.minds-project.net), is aimed
at optimizing processes in the value chains of mobile
services. The group developed innovative mobile media
services and defined European metadata standards for news.
MINDS project concentrates on promoting the mobile
channel for news delivery, including business issues,
metadata issues, alerting issues and technological issues.
Our ePaper project aims to deliver a whole newspaper
product/service, rather than specific stand-alone news
services or alerts about these services.
DigiNews [5] is a European research and development
project in the electronic media domain. It aims at finding
new ways of distributing and consuming the future
electronic newspaper. More specifically, it aims at
combining useful features of printed newspapers, such as
simplicity of use, high accessibility and high mobility, with
important features of electronic media, such as the ability to
update news continually and the options of multimedia
news. The possibilities of personalizing the delivered
newspaper's contents are also examined. The DigiNews
project deals with personalization too, but with regard to
adaptation of the user interface to users' preferences, while
content personalization is done only as part of the
augmented uses, and therefore only on a limited scale. Also,
there doesn't appear to be any information in DigiNews
public articles about the existence of any user's search
engine. Our ePaper project, in contrast, pays much attention
to users' ability to browse and search for relevant news.
The CoMet project [11] was carried as a successor of
SmartPush which built a personated delivery system for
economic news items. Four kinds of services have been
defined in CoMet:
x Personalizing: filtering incoming information according
to users' content-based profiles.
x Content reuse: finding information needed for re-
publishing of content, e.g. in a second publishing
channel.
x Information augmentation: finding new information that
can serve as background for the news to be published.
x Story chain management: managing the relations between
different stories in the news.
CoMet deals with matching news-items metadata and user-
profile metadata, CoMet did not concentrate on newspaper
delivery to mobile devices in general, and to e-paper
devices in particular, though it mentions that mobile
devices delivery may benefit from its results. Contrarily,
our ePaper Project concentrates, as far as output devices are
concerned, on delivery to mobile devices, especially e-
paper-like devices.
3. GENERAL ARCHITECTURE OF EPAPER SYSTEM
Figure 1 presents an overview of the ePaper architecture.
Content Providers
S ystem M anagem ent T ools
ePaper S ystem - Server
Aggregator
Content Manager ePaper Client
Personalization
Content Delivery Services
Figure 1. ePaper architecture
The ePaper system was implemented based on client-server
architecture. The server side consists of four layers. The
first, Content Layer, including the Aggregator and the
Content Manager. The aggregator interacts with content
(news) providers and collects news item to a local storage.
The content manager processes the content received and
prepares it for delivery to users. The system maintains
hierarchical news ontology based on the NewsML subject
codes defined by IPTC (www.iptc.org). The content
manager classifies each news item to relevant ontology
concepts The Personalization layer consists of a novel
personalization engine which prepares ranked lists of news
items to be delivered to users. The personalization engine
combines an ontology-driven content-based filtering
algorithm with a time-aware collaborative filtering
algorithm. The Content Delivery Services layer orchestrates
the processes of the system. It interacts with the
Personalization layer, submits requests for personalized
news and sends the ranked news items it receives to the
client. It also receives feedback from the client (tracking
user's behavior data) and sends this data to the
Personalization layer, which updates the user's profile to
reflect the recent user's reading preferences. The System
Management Tools layer provides standard system tools
such as logging and reporting, as well as special tools for
the ePaper application, including the Ontology Editor that
enables maintenance of the ontology. Also included is a
registration system where a user can register and define to
the ePaper services he will subscribe. The user provides
information about the content providers from whom to
receive content, demographic and billing information. The
user can also opt to define explicitly his areas of interest,
choosing concepts from the news ontology. The Client sub-
system interacts with the content delivery for receiving
data. The data includes profile information on the profiles
registered to the device, and a ranked list of news items that
suits the user preferences. The client is in charge of
rendering the content and adapting it to preferred layout and
presenting the content to the user. To manage the variety
and constraints of different mobile devices, the system
supports dynamic content adaptation mechanisms based on
the device that the user owns, the user's preferences and the
local customizations made by each user. Thus, the
presentation of content functionality is loosely coupled with
the content preparation process, a capability that may scale
the number and variety of devices supporting this service
easily. In the following section we provide more detail
about the main components, namely the content
management, the client system, and the content delivery.
The personalization layer is detailed in Section 4.
3.1 Content Management
Figure 2 presents the Content Management layer of the
ePaper system. It receives pre-processed content from the
aggregator and stores processed content to the repository
layer. The major responsibility of the Content Management
layer is to classify (map) each news item to ontology
Content
Manager
Interpreter
Manager
repository
Interpreter 2
Similarity to
NewsML
Similarity
items in other
Computational
Interpreter
Component
sources
Temporal
Media similarity
Manager Identifier
Classifier Ontology
manager
News Editor
concepts.
Figure 2. Content Management layer
3.1.1 Content Manager
The Content Manager is orchestrating the content
management layer processes. It receives raw content items
from the Aggregator and sends them to the Interpreter
Manager. The Content Manager also receives interpreted
and classified data back from the Classifier and sends it to
the other functional units. After the content item passes all
the functional services, it is ready to be sent to the
repository and used by the Personalization layer.
3.1.2. Interpreter Manager
The ePaper system is able to handle news items coming
from multiple sources and in multiple formats. The
Interpreter Manager is responsible for identifying and
activating the appropriate interpreter for each content item,
i.e., the interpreter that is able to "understand" the specific
content item's format and extract the relevant fields. The
input for the Interpreter Manager is a content item received
from the Content Manager. The result of the Interpreter
Manager's activity is the execution of the proper interpreter.
3.1.3. NewsML Interpreter
The NewsML Interpreter is an example to an interpreter
implemented in the ePaper system. It receives content items
in NewsML format, extracts relevant meta-data fields (e.g.
the newspaper, language, authors, etc.), and passes back the
parsed content to the Classifier.
The ePaper may handle any other standard formats by
developing dedicated interpreters to each standard.
3.1.4 Classifier
The ePaper system uses an ontology, which is a small and
limited hierarchy of the NewsCodes concepts. The
Classifier component is responsible for determining the
ontology concepts which will represent each news item, i.e.,
to define the content-based profile of each item. For this
purpose, the Classifier component utilizes a hierarchical
multi-label classification algorithm.
The hierarchical multi-label classification algorithm
implemented in ePaper uses flat multi-class classification
provided by LingPipe open source software
[http://www.alias-i.com/lingpipe/index.html]. LingPipe
classification method is based on statistical language
modeling techniques and uses Bayesian decision theory.
We apply top-down level-based approach for hierarchical
classification. According to this approach, separate
classification models are constructed at each level of the
category tree. There is a separate model for classification
for each concept of the ontology at every level of the
hierarchy. Hence, the number of generated models is
identical to the number of concepts in the hierarchy.
The classification process is performed in top-down, level-
based approach. First, the content is classified into one or
more high level categories. Then, it is further classified into
one or more child concepts of the categories assigned at the
previous stage. Then, if one or more of second sub level
concepts were assigned to the content, it is further classified
into their child concepts. The classification process stops
when classification to the detailed concept is not confident
enough. The confidence thresholds are defined by
configuration parameters defined by empirical runs.
Once the results of the classifications at each level are categories, or retrieves requested items without
obtained, the final classification is determined according to personalization.
the received concepts’ weights and configuration
parameters. The most specific concept is assigned if its Client System
score is above the pre-defined multi-label threshold
Application (Layout/API) Upgrade
parameter; else, the concept with the highest score is Push Based Content Delivery
Server
Breaking News / Alerts Server Server
assigned to the content.
3.1.5 Similarity Computation
This component computes the similarity between a new XML Based Newspaper Application
incoming content item and other "active" items existing in
the repository. If the new item is deemed "very similar" to Newspaper Runtime API
an existing item, two different situations are distinguished:
a) that the new item is very similar to an existing item that
Ontology Directory Content Delivery Favorites Archives Local
came from another source; b) that the new item is very Services Services Management Management
Multimedia Viewer
Settings

similar to an existing item that came from the same source.

The objective is to prevent sending to a user a news item
that is very similar to an item that the user already read -
unless the user opted to obtain such "redundant" news. But
if the new item came from the same source, it is assumed
that it contains more recent/updated information and will
therefore be delivered to the user. To identify similarities
between items, we use the vector-based classifier [8].
3.1.6 Media Manager
Media Manager is responsible to manage the processing of
all media that arrives to the ePaper system including
conversion to the ePaper format and generation of a new
item instance.
3.2 Client Subsystem
The client sub subsystem surrounds every functional unit
planned to support the mobile application activity on the
device, as well as the mobile application itself. This sub
system includes the following functionality areas:
x Local servers receiving breaking news, alerts and
software upgrades
x Newspaper runtime environment, the platform on which
mobile applications designed are supposed to run
x Infrastructure services such as: offline proxy for
maintaining connection-less environment, remote
communication services and local XML persistence layer
x Client application service, including favorites
management, multimedia viewing, user settings
management and remote ontology browsing services
Figure 3 presents the client sub-system architecture.
3.3 Content Delivery
The Content Delivery subsystem intervenes before content
is delivered to the client side and mediates between the
client side and the Personalization subsystem. In order to
send the relevant content to a specific user, the Content
Delivery interacts with the Personalization subsystem and
requests the personalized ranked items for specific
XML based local storage
Offline Proxy CommServices
“read later”, clicks cache Web Services IFS
Content, Archives, Favorites,
Profile, Settings, History
Operating System – Communication Services – UI Services – Portable Embedded Virtual
Machine
Figure 3. Client subsystem architecture
A client may have several kinds of requests to the Content
Delivery subsystem: a request for news items, a request for
ranking of items, a request for a "standard edition" of a
newspaper, and a request for the user's profiles according to
the device. A request for news items returns to the client a
set of the requested items without their ranking. A request
for ranking returns to the client a set of items, based on the
number of items requested and the requested categories to
which those items belong,, to be presented in the client.
Another process in the Content Delivery module is the
clicks setting process. It receives from the client the ID of
the user and the clicked item, and updates the user's profiles
accordingly.
4. PERSONALIZATION AND CONTENT ADAPTATION
In this section, some of the innovative ideas of the ePaper
project are described, namely the personalization and the
content adaptation algorithms.
4.1 Personalization
The Personalization engine of the ePaper system should
consider the special characteristics of a mobile newspaper
environment:
x Item relevancy over time – the relevancy of different
types of news items decreases differently over time
x Items are presented to a user using hierarchical
navigation scheme - the engine should provide ranked
lists of relevant items within any level of concepts
hierarchy
 x New news items are continuously incoming to the
system and stay active for a short period of time. The
cold start (new item) and sparsity problem should be
well addressed
To address these challenges, we developed a hybrid
filtering method which combines ontology- content-based
filtering with time-aware collaborative filtering. The
decrease in item's relevancy is addressed by a time-aware
collaborative process. The use of the ontology enables
representing the items and the users with concepts from the
same vocabulary, and measuring the similarity between
item and user profiles considering the hierarchical distance
between concepts in the two profiles. The combination of
the collaborative and content-based filtering techniques
enables to overcome the problems of "cold start" and
sparsity, as it uses the content-based filter for new item,
which still have no reading history, and dynamically
increases the weight of the collaborative filter, as a read
item accumulates more "clicks" (i.e. it is read by more
users).
Few ontological-based profiling models exist in which user
profiles are represented with ontology concepts as well as
the item profile [7, 11]. However, in those studies, the
computation of similarity between the user and item does
not consider concept level hierarchy; the ontology hierarchy
is used naively only for profile update via feedback, e.g.;
fractional interest in a higher-level concept is inferred when
a specific topic is added. In the ePaper, the content-based
filter considers the distance between concepts in the item's
profile and the user's profile, according to their location in
the hierarchal ontology. Exact details on the content-based
filtering method can be found in [9].
The collaborative filter of ePaper includes a dynamic time-
decay factor, which is determined according to the age of
the item. The intuition is that news items lose relevancy
over time. We plan to learn and use different decay factors
for different concepts (e.g., political related news might
lose their relevancy faster than technology related news).
Some collaborative systems use a decay factor usually
decreasing the user interest level in a concept rather than
reducing the item weight. No consideration of different
decaying factors [10].
Here is a brief overview of the main steps of the filtering
process:
Step 1: Get a request to provide a ranked list of relevant
news items for a user.
Step 2: Use the content-based filter to rank the "active"
items in the repository for a user. In essence, the relevancy
estimation function measures the similarity (distance)
between each concept in the item's profile to respective
concepts in the user's profile, considering not only the co-
occurring concepts but also occurrences of neighboring
(parent and child) concepts, according to the hierarchical
ontology. Based on the number of co-occurring concepts
and similar concepts, a similarity score is computed for
each item.
Step 3: Use the collaborative filter to rank the "active"
items in the repository for a user. We adjusted K-nn
algorithm to consider a decaying factor of item’s relevancy
over time, considering different decaying factors for
different ontological concepts. We compute the following:
x Find the user neighborhood: compute the user
similarity score (USS) for the user with all the other
users
x Compute a time-discount weight for each click on the
item to be ranked
x Compute the weighted average of all the clicks on the
item: considers how similar is the “clicking user”
(USS) and the time he clicked the item (the time
discount)
x The result so far is two lists of ranked items, one
according to the content-based filter, and the other –
according to the collaborative filter.
Step 4: Use a weighted combination scheme considering the
“maturity” of each item, i.e. how many rates (clicks) it has.
The more rates, the more weight is given to the
collaborative filter. Hence, a new item is ranked based on
the content-based filter only; as time passes and an item
gets more clicks, the weight of the collaborative filter
increases
4.2 Content Adaptation
The content adaptation challenge of the ePaper project deals
with the question of how to adjust news content collected to
the ePaper database for presentation to the individual
reader. It assumes that readers differ in their preferences
regarding the density and style of information presentation,
as well as in their interests. It also aims to develop an
automated system that can generate content adaptations and
screen layouts without the intervention of a human editor.
To address this challenge we first conducted empirical
research to study the various aspects of the problem. The
empirical part consists of three interrelated lines of
research. One series of experiments dealt with the
arrangement of pages in a newspaper, focusing mainly on
the comparison of serial and hierarchic navigation. The
research demonstrates the advantages of each type of
structure and develops a model to determine the relative
benefits of each.
The second line of research looked at user's preferences
regarding the layout of news sites as a function of
information density and structure of the layout.
The third line of research consists of a series of experiments
that aimed to generate a function for predicting the apparent
importance of an item on a page as a function of visual
properties of the item. The experiments showed that
importance perception is a very rapid process (even after a
0.5 second exposure to a page,, people generate stable
assessments of the relative importance of items). We can
now predict with a high degree of accuracy the perceived
importance of a certain item according to its dimensions
relatively to other items and location on screen.
We developed an algorithm for the automatic generation of
screen layouts. The purpose of the algorithm, and its main
innovation compared to previous work on automated layout
generation, is the attempt to develop a system that can
create layouts, based on a very limited set of parameters, for
a wide range of devices that differ in display resolution,
screen size, and screen dimensions. Existing approaches for
achieving this goal are originated in different
methodologies such as ‘stock cutting’ problems
(Elmaghraby, Abdelhafiz & Hassan, 2000) and ‘floorplan
area’ of circuits in VLSI manufacturing (Knog, Hong &
Qiao, 1997). In most cases these approaches aim generate a
layout that minimize the area consumption, for predefined
number of items. In addition these items usually have a set
of positioning constraints between themselves (e.g. order, Figure 4a. Teenager layout
or adjacent items). Our algorithm goal is to populate an
entire given area, with undefined number of items, having
no display constrains between them, rather then having
individual display constrains to user only.
The proposed algorithm uses an iterative division method to
create smaller and smaller areas of the screen. The system
stops the division process when the generated areas reach
the minimal area size. Following the division process, areas
with one dimension smaller than the minimal area are
merged according different policies. The layout, generated
by the division and merging processes, is then populated by
items according to their importance. The output of the
algorithm is an xml-based description of the layout that is
then used by the client system as basics for generation of
actual layouts. The user can switch between layout, and the
user selection of layout is saved to his profile.
Figures 4a and 4b present different layouts generated for
the ePaper system.

Figure 4b – Business layout

SUMMARY AND FUTURE ISSUES

The full version of the ePaper prototype system is now
undergoing usability tests, aimed at examining the users'
reactions to the service and tests the navigation and
browsing capabilities.
Concurrently, we conduct evaluations the personalization
and content adaptation algorithms, as well as intuitive
interface related research.
For the personalization algorithms we examine the effect of
various parameters of the filtering performance; e.g.:
- optimal scores of partially similar concepts, according to
their hierarchical distance, and their marginal
contribution
- optimal number of concepts to consider in the user’s
profile and the items’ profile
- schemes to analyze the user feedback (e.g. clicks; time of
reading, ranking of clicked item)
- optimal decaying factor (the impact of time on the
collaborative and combined filters)
We are running controlled experiments with users to
evaluate the relevancy of news items, compared to the
system’s ranking of those items based on the filtering
methods. We are running simulations manipulating various
parameters, and calculate standard and novel filtering
measures, e,g, MAE, precision, recall, PIP (Hyung, 2008).
We are currently in the midst of conducting laboratory
experiments about the design of the ePaper to understand:
x How the aesthetic design of online news sites affect
users’ emotions and attitudes towards the product
x The effects of typical vs. novel designs of the ePaper
(relative to other news sources) on users’ preferences
of those designs
The results of these experiments will provide further
guidelines regarding the design of the ePaper and similar
products.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The ePaper project is sponsored by Deutsche Telekom Co.
and is performed at Deutsche Telekom Laboratories at Ben-
Gurion University
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