In plain words: This survey gathers work on making ranked lists fairer and sorts it into four frameworks based on the values each fairness rule protects, linking goals to the techniques that achieve them. It unifies ideas across fields and gives recommendations for evaluating fair ranking methods.
Abstract
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 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. Then, 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.
Meike Zehlike, Ke Yang, Julia Stoyanovich
arXiv:2103.14000 · cs.IR, cs.DB · submitted Mar 25, 2021 · updated Aug 12, 2022
abstract · pdf · html · 72 pages. ACM CSUR (2022)