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Challenging the status quo in search engine ranking algorithms

Challenging the status quo in search engine ranking algorithms

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How can we bring more fairness to search result ranking? This was the question tackled by our FATE (Fairness Accountability Transparency Ethics) group in the 2020 Text REtrieval Conference’s (TREC) Fairness Ranking Track. In the context of searching for academic papers, the assigned goal of the track was the goal was to develop an algorithm that provides fair exposure to different groups of authors while ensuring that the papers are relevant to the search queries. 

The Approach

To achieve that goal, the group decided to use “gender” and “country” as key attributes because they were general enough to be applied to all author groups. From there, the group created an  fairness-aware algorithm that was used to run two specific tasks: 

  1. An information retrieval task where the goal was to return a ranked list of papers to serve as the candidate papers for re-ranking
  2. Re-ranking task where the goal was to rank the candidate papers based on the relevance to a given query, while accounting for fair author group exposure

To evaluate the relevance of the academic papers, the group relied on BM25, which is an algorithm frequently used by search engines.

The Findings

By randomly shuffling the academic papers, the result was high levels of fairness if only the gender of the authors was considered. In contrast, if only the country of the authors was  considered, fairness was relatively lower. With the proposed algorithm, data can be re-ranked based on an arbitrary number of group definitions. However, to fully provide fair and relevant results, more attributes need to be explored. 

Why is fairness in search rankings important?

We use search engines everyday to find out information and answers for almost everything in our lives. And the ranking of the search results determine what kind of content we are likely to consume. This poses a risk because ranking algorithms often leave out the underrepresented groups, whether it’s a small business, or a research lab that is not established yet. At the same time, the results tend to only show information we like to see or agree with, which could lack diversity and contribute to bias. 

Interested in learning more? Check out the full research paper here: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2011.02066.pdf 

Creating a fairer search engine

Creating a fairer search engine

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It’s getting increasingly more important to understand, evaluate, and perhaps rethink our search results as they continue to show bias of various kinds. Given that so much of our decision-making relies on search engine results, this is a problem that touches almost all aspects of our lives. Read about some of our new works in a new article by InfoSeekers Ruoyuan Gao and Chirag Shah:

Gao, R. & Shah, C. (2020). Toward Creating a Fairer Ranking in Search Engine Results. Journal of Information Processing and Management (IP&M), 57 (1).

With the increasing popularity and social influence of search engines in IR, various studies have raised concerns on the presence of bias in search engines and the social responsibilities of IR systems. As an essential component of search engine, ranking is a crucial mechanism in presenting the search results or recommending items in a fair fashion. In this article, we focus on the top-k diversity fairness ranking in terms of statistical parity fairness and disparate impact fairness. The former fairness definition provides a balanced overview of search results where the number of documents from different groups are equal; The latter enables a realistic overview where the proportion of documents from different groups reflect the overall proportion. Using 100 queries and top 100 results per query from Google as the data, we first demonstrate how topical diversity bias is present in the top web search results. Then, with our proposed entropy-based metrics for measuring the degree of bias, we reveal that the top search results are unbalanced and disproportionate to their overall diversity distribution. We explore several fairness ranking strategies to investigate the relationship between fairness, diversity, novelty and relevance. Our experimental results show that using a variant of fair ε-greedy strategy, we could bring more fairness and enhance diversity in search results without a cost of relevance. In fact, we can improve the relevance and diversity by introducing the diversity fairness. Additional experiments with TREC datasets containing 50 queries demonstrate the robustness of our proposed strategies and our findings on the impact of fairness. We present a series of correlation analysis on the amount of fairness and diversity, showing that statistical parity fairness highly correlates with diversity while disparate impact fairness does not. This provides clear and tangible implications for future works where one would want to balance fairness, diversity and relevance in search results.