Information access systems, such as search engines and recommender systems, order and position results based on their estimated relevance. These results are then evaluated for a range of concerns, including provider-side fairness: whether exposure to users is fairly distributed among items and the people who created them. Several fairness-aware ranking and re-ranking techniques have been proposed to ensure fair exposure for providers, but this work focuses almost exclusively on linear layouts in which items are displayed in single ranked list. Many widely-used systems use other layouts, such as the grid views common in streaming platforms, image search, and other applications. Providing fair exposure to providers in such layouts is not well-studied. We seek to fill this gap by providing a grid-aware re-ranking algorithm to optimize layouts for provider-side fairness by adapting existing re-ranking techniques to grid-aware browsing models, and an analysis of the effect of grid-specific factors such as device size on the resulting fairness optimization. Our work provides a starting point and identifies open gaps in ensuring provider-side fairness in grid-based layouts.
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Fairness-aware Recommendation with librec-auto
Comparative experimentation is important for studying reproducibility in recommender systems. This is particularly true in areas without well-established methodologies, such as fairness-aware recommendation. In this paper, we describe fairness-aware enhancements to our recommender systems experimentation tool librec-auto. These enhancements include metrics for various classes of fairness definitions, extension of the experimental model to support result re-ranking and a library of associated re-ranking algorithms, and additional support for experiment automation and reporting. The associated demo will help attendees move quickly to configuring and running their own experiments with librec-auto.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1911025
- PAR ID:
- 10253138
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- RecSys '20: Fourteenth ACM Conference on Recommender Systems
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 594 to 596
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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