Fair Recommender Systems
In this project, we are investigating several questions of fairness and bias in recommender systems:
- What does it mean for a recommender to be fair, unfair, or biased?
- What potentially discriminatory biases are present in the recommender’s input data, algorithmic structure, or output?
- How do these biases change over time through the recommender-user feedback loop?
This is a part of our overall, ongoing goal to help make recommenders (and other AI systems) better for the people they affect.
Blog Posts and Other Coverage
Funding
- 2018–2023: NSF award 1751278, $482,081: CAREER: User-Based Simulation Methods for Quantifying Sources of Error and Bias in Recommender Systems
Workshops and Meetings
I have been involved with several workshops, sessions, etc. related to fair recommendation.
- Fair Recommendation & Retrieval tutorial
- Fairness track at TREC 2019
- FATREC2 at RecSys 2018
- Recommenders Session at FAT* 2018
- FATREC at RecSys 2017, the Workshop on Responsible Recommendation (proceedings)
Publications
2023. Much Ado About Gender: Current Practices and Future Recommendations for Appropriate Gender-Aware Information Access. To appear in ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR '23). DOI 10.1145/3576840.3578316. arXiv:2301.04780.
, , , and .2022. Matching Consumer Fairness Objectives & Strategies for RecSys. Presented at the 5th FAccTrec Workshop on Responsible Recommendation (peer-reviewed but not archived). DOI 10.48550/arXiv.2209.02662. arXiv:2209.02662 [cs.IR].
and .2022. Fire Dragon and Unicorn Princess: Gender Stereotypes and Children's Products in Search Engine Responses. In SIGIR eCom '22. DOI 10.48550/arXiv.2206.13747. arXiv:2206.13747 [cs.IR]. Cited 1 time.
and .2022. Fairness in Information Access Systems. Foundations and Trends® in Information Retrieval 16(1–2) (July 2022), 1–177. DOI 10.1561/1500000079. arXiv:2105.05779 [cs.IR]. Cited 17 times. Cited 24 times.
, , , and .2022. The Multisided Complexity of Fairness in Recommender Systems. AI Magazine 43(2) (June 2022), 164–176. DOI 10.1002/aaai.12054. NSF PAR 10334796. Cited 4 times. Cited 3 times.
, , , and .2022. Fairness in Recommender Systems. In Recommender Systems Handbook (3rd edition). Francesco Ricci, Lior Roach, and Bracha Shapira, eds. Springer-Verlag. DOI 10.1007/978-1-0716-2197-4_18. ISBN 978-1-0716-2196-7. Cited 2 times. Cited 7 times.
, , , and .2021. Exploring Author Gender in Book Rating and Recommendation. User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction 31(3) (February 2021), 377–420. DOI 10.1007/s11257-020-09284-2. NSF PAR 10218853. Cited 114* times.
and .2021. Estimation of Fair Ranking Metrics with Incomplete Judgments. In Proceedings of The Web Conference 2021 (TheWebConf 2021). ACM. DOI 10.1145/3442381.3450080. arXiv:2108.05152. NSF PAR 10237411. Acceptance rate: 21%. Cited 20 times. Cited 21 times.
, , , , , and .2020. Evaluating Stochastic Rankings with Expected Exposure. In Proceedings of the 29th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM '20). ACM, pp. 275–284. DOI 10.1145/3340531.3411962. arXiv:2004.13157 [cs.IR]. NSF PAR 10199451. Acceptance rate: 20%. Nominated for Best Long Paper. Cited 83 times. Cited 89 times.
, , , , and .2020. Comparing Fair Ranking Metrics. Presented at the 3rd FAccTrec Workshop on Responsible Recommendation (peer-reviewed but not archived). DOI 10.48550/arXiv.2009.01311. arXiv:2009.01311 [cs.IR]. Cited 14 times. Cited 16 times.
, , , and .2020. Overview of the TREC 2019 Fair Ranking Track. In The Twenty-Eighth Text REtrieval Conference (TREC 2019) Proceedings (TREC 2019). DOI 10.48550/arXiv.2003.11650. arXiv:2003.11650. Cited 22 times. Cited 27 times.
, , , and .2019. FACTS-IR: Fairness, Accountability, Confidentiality, Transparency, and Safety in Information Retrieval. SIGIR Forum 53(2) (December 2019), 20–43. DOI 10.1145/3458553.3458556. Cited 4 times. Cited 14 times.
, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , and .2018. Exploring Author Gender in Book Rating and Recommendation. In Proceedings of the 12th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys '18). ACM, pp. 242–250. DOI 10.1145/3240323.3240373. arXiv:1808.07586v1 [cs.IR]. Acceptance rate: 17.5%. Cited 109 times. Citations reported under UMUAI21*.
, , , , and .2018. All The Cool Kids, How Do They Fit In?: Popularity and Demographic Biases in Recommender Evaluation and Effectiveness. In Proceedings of the 1st Conference on Fairness, Accountability and Transparency (FAT* 2018). PMLR, Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 81:172–186. Acceptance rate: 24%. Cited 138 times. Cited 154 times.
, , , , , , and .2017. The Demographics of Cool: Popularity and Recommender Performance for Different Groups of Users. In RecSys 2017 Poster Proceedings. CEUR, Workshop Proceedings 1905. Cited 5 times. Cited 14 times.
and .Workshop Summaries
2020. 3rd FATREC Workshop: Responsible Recommendation. In Proceedings of the 14th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys '20). ACM. DOI 10.1145/3383313.3411538. Cited 4 times. Cited 4 times.
, , , , and .2020. FairUMAP 2020: The 3rd Workshop on Fairness in User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization. In Proceedings of the 28th ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (UMAP '20). ACM. DOI 10.1145/3340631.3398671. Cited 2 times. Cited 2 times.
, , , , , and .2019. Workshop on Fairness, Accountability, Confidentiality, Transparency, and Safety in Information Retrieval (FACTS-IR). In Proceedings of the 42nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR '19). ACM. DOI 10.1145/3331184.3331644. Cited 6 times. Cited 24 times.
, , , and .2019. FairUMAP 2019 Chairs' Welcome Overview. In Adjunct Publication of the 27th Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (UMAP '19). ACM. DOI 10.1145/3314183.3323842.
, , , , , , , , and .2018. 2nd FATREC Workshop: Responsible Recommendation. In Proceedings of the 12th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys '18). ACM. DOI 10.1145/3240323.3240335. Cited 8 times. Cited 10 times.
, , and .2018. UMAP 2018 Fairness in User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization (FairUMAP 2018) Chairs' Welcome & Organization. In Adjunct Publication of the 26th Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalization (UMAP '18). ACM. DOI 10.1145/3213586.3226200.
, , , and .2017. The FATREC Workshop on Responsible Recommendation. In Proceedings of the 11th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems (RecSys '17). ACM. DOI 10.1145/3109859.3109960. Cited 11 times.
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