Patterns of Gender-Specializing Query Reformulation
2023. Patterns of Gender-Specializing Query Reformulation. To appear as a short paper in ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR '23). DOI 10.1145/3539618.3592034. arXiv:2304.13129.
, , , and .
Abstract
Users of search systems often reformulate their queries by adding query terms to reflect their evolving information need or to more precisely express their information need when the system fails to surface relevant content. Analyzing these query reformulations can inform us about both system and user behavior. In this work, we study a special category of query reformulations that involve specifying demographic group attributes, such as gender, as part of the reformulated query (e.g., âolympic 2021 soccer resultsâ â âolympic 2021 womenâs soccer resultsâ). There are many ways a query, the search results, and a demographic attribute such as gender may relate, leading us to hypothesize different causes for these reformulation patterns, such as under-representation on the original result page or based on the linguistic theory of markedness. This paper reports on an observational study of gender-specializing query reformulationsâtheir contexts and effectsâas a lens on the relationship between system results and gender, based on large-scale search log data from Bing. We find that these reformulations sometimes correct for and other times reinforce gender representation on the original result page, but typically yield better access to the ultimately-selected results. The prevalence of these reformulationsâand which gender they skew towardsâdiffer by topical context. However, we do not find evidence that either group under-representation or markedness alone adequately explains these reformulations. We hope that future research will use such reformulations as a probe for deeper investigation into gender (and other demographic) representation on the search result page.