In the past few years, there has been much work on incorporating fairness requirements into algorithmic rankers, with contributions coming from the data management, algorithms, information retrieval, and recommender systems communities. In this survey we give a systematic overview of this work, offering a broad perspective that connects formalizations and algorithmic approaches across subfields. An important contribution of our work is in developing a common narrative around the value frameworks that motivate specific fairness-enhancing interventions in ranking. This allows us to unify the presentation of mitigation objectives and of algorithmic techniques to help meet those objectives or identify trade-offs. In the first part of this survey, we describe four classification frameworks for fairness-enhancing interventions, along which we relate the technical methods surveyed in this paper, discuss evaluation datasets, and present technical work on fairness in score-based ranking. In this second part of this survey, we present methods that incorporate fairness in supervised learning, and also give representative examples of recent work on fairness in recommendation and matchmaking systems. We also discuss evaluation frameworks for fair score-based ranking and fair learning-to-rank, and draw a set of recommendations for the evaluation of fair ranking methods.
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Fairness in Ranking: From Values to Technical Choices and Back
In the past few years, there has been much work on incorporating fairness requirements into the design of algorithmic rankers, with contributions from the data management, algorithms, information retrieval, and recommender systems communities. In this tutorial, we give a systematic overview of this work, offering a broad perspective that connects formalizations and algorithmic approaches across subfields. During the first part of the tutorial, we present a classification framework for fairness-enhancing interventions, along which we will then relate the technical methods. This framework allows us to unify the presentation of mitigation objectives and of algorithmic techniques to help meet those objectives or identify trade-offs. Next, we discuss fairness in score-based ranking and in supervised learning-to-rank. We conclude with recommendations for practitioners, to help them select a fair ranking method based on the requirements of their specific application domain.
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- PAR ID:
- 10437292
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- SIGMOD '23: Companion of the 2023 International Conference on Management of Data
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 7 to 12
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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