Toward A Two-Sided Fairness Framework in Search and Recommendation

Abstract

As artificial intelligence (AI) assisted search and recommender systems have become ubiquitous in workplaces and everyday lives, understanding and accounting for fairness has gained increasing attention in the design and evaluation of such systems. While there is a growing body of computing research on measuring system fairness and biases associated with data and algorithms, the impact of human biases that go beyond traditional machine learning (ML) pipelines still remain understudied. In this Perspective Paper, we seek to develop a two-sided fairness framework that not only characterizes data and algorithmic biases, but also highlights the cognitive and perceptual biases that may exacerbate system biases and lead to unfair decisions. Within the framework, we also analyze the interactions between human and system biases in search and recommendation episodes. Built upon the two-sided framework, our research synthesizes intervention and intelligent nudging strategies applied in cognitive and algorithmic debiasing, and also proposes novel goals and measures for evaluating the performance of systems in addressing and proactively mitigating the risks associated with biases in data, algorithms, and bounded rationality. This paper uniquely integrates the insights regarding human biases and system biases into a cohesive framework and extends the concept of fairness from human-centered perspective. The extended fairness framework better reflects the challenges and opportunities in users’ interactions with search and recommender systems of varying modalities. Adopting the two-sided approach in information system design has the potential to enhancing both the effectiveness in online debiasing and the usefulness to boundedly rational users engaging in information-intensive decision-making.

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