📰 HeadLines Plus – Personalized News Recommendation System

A modular Java-based application that delivers personalized news recommendations based on user interactions and preferences. Built with JavaFX, MySQL, and core Object-Oriented Programming principles, this system offers content categorization, adaptive learning, and a user-friendly interface.

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🚀 Features

👤 User Functionality

• ✅ User Registration & Login (with validation)
• 📂 View Uncategorized and Categorized Articles
• 👍 Interact with Articles (Read, Like, Skip)
• 🧠 Personalized Recommendations (via TF-IDF + weighting)
• 📜 View Interaction History
• 🛠 Update Account Information

🛠 Admin Functionality

• 🔐 Admin Login
• 👥 View & Delete Registered Users
• 🌐 Activate NewsAPI to fetch new articles
• 💾 Store Fetched Articles in the database

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🧠 Recommendation Engine

• 📊 TF-IDF Vectorization of combined article text (title + description + content)
• 🧮 Cosine Similarity for relevance computation
• 📈 Adaptive Weighting Algorithm to refine future recommendations
• 📂 User-Specific Dataset created dynamically from past interactions

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🧱 System Architecture

+-----------------------------+
|        JavaFX GUI          |
| (Login, Register, Articles)|
+-------------+--------------+
              |
              v
+-------------+--------------+
|       Controllers Layer     |
| (HomeController, NewsApp...)|
+-------------+--------------+
              |
              v
+-------------+--------------+
|       Core Classes Layer    |
| (User.java, Article.java...)|
+-------------+--------------+
              |
              v
+-------------+--------------+
|    Services and Utilities   |
| (APIService, NewsParser...) |
+-------------+--------------+
              |
              v
+-------------+--------------+
|     MySQL Database Layer    |
| (users, articles, preferences) |
+-----------------------------+

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🧰 Tech Stack

Layer	Technology
👨‍💻 GUI Frontend	JavaFX + FXML + CSS
💡 Business Logic	Java (OOP principles)
🧠 ML Integration	TF-IDF + Cosine Similarity
🔗 API Integration	NewsAPI.org
🗄️ Database	MySQL (via JDBC)
📁 File Handling	CSV/JSON where needed
🧪 Testing	Manual Testing + Debugging

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⚙️ Setup Instructions

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/yourusername/headlines-plus.git

2. Open Project in IntelliJ IDEA (or any Java IDE with JavaFX support)

3. Set Up Database:

   • Create a MySQL database named: news_appdb
   • Use the provided DB dump to restore tables: users, articles, user_preferences, etc.

4. Insert Your API Key:

   • Get a free key from NewsAPI.org
   • Paste it in APIService.java

5. Run the Application:

   • Start from Main.java
   • Explore features: Register → Browse → Interact → Get Recommendations!

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📚 References

• TF-IDF Explained – GeeksforGeeks
• Content-Based Recommendation – GFG
• Java MySQL Integration – YouTube
• NewsAPI Documentation

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👨‍🎓 Author

Deshan Senanayake