Fairness in Information Access Systems
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recommendation, information retrieval, and other information access systems pose unique challenges for investigating and applying the fairness and non-discrimination concepts that have been developed for studying other machine learning systems. While fair information access shares many commonalities with fair classification, there are important differences: the multistakeholder nature of information access applications, the rank-based problem setting, the centrality of personalization in many cases, and the role of user response all complicate the problem of identifying precisely what types and operationalizations of fairness may be relevant. In this monograph, we present a taxonomy of the various dimensions of fair information access and survey the literature to date on this new and rapidly-growing topic. We preface this with brief introductions to information access and algorithmic fairness to facilitate the use of this work by scholars with experience in one (or neither) of these fields who wish to study their intersection. We conclude with several open problems in fair information access, along with some suggestions for how to approach research in this space. Recommendation, information retrieval, and other information access systems pose unique challenges for investigating and applying the fairness and non-discrimination concepts that have been developed for studying other machine learning systems. While fair information access shares many commonalities with fair classification, there are important differences such as the multistakeholder nature of information access applications, the rank-based problem setting, the centrality of personalization in many cases, and the role of user response. These all complicate the problem of identifying precisely what types and operationalizations of fairness may be relevant. In this monograph, the authors present a taxonomy of the various dimensions of fair information access and survey the literature to date on this new and rapidly-growing topic. They preface this with brief introductions to information access and algorithmic fairness to facilitate the use of this work by scholars who wish to study their intersection. The authors conclude with several open problems in fair information access and present suggestions for how to approach research in this space.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.031 | 0.076 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.025 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".