Abstract
Bias in web search has been in the spotlight of bias detection research for quite a while. At the same time, little attention has been paid to query suggestions in this regard. Awareness of the problem of biased query suggestions has been raised. Likewise, there is a rising need for automatic bias detection approaches. This paper adds on the bias detection pipeline for bias detection in query suggestions of person-related search developed by Bonart et al. [2]. The sparseness and lack of contextual metadata of query suggestions make them a difficult subject for bias detection. Furthermore, query suggestions are perceived very briefly and subliminally. To overcome these issues, perception-aware metrics are introduced. Consequently, the enhanced pipeline is able to better detect systematic topical bias in search engine query suggestions for person-related searches. The results of an analysis performed with the developed pipeline confirm this assumption. Due to the perception-aware bias detection metrics, findings produced by the pipeline can be assumed to reflect bias that users would discern.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Bolukbasi, T., Chang, K.W., Zou, J., Saligrama, V., Kalai, A.: Man is to computer programmer as woman is to homemaker? Debiasing word embeddings (2016). http://arxiv.org/abs/1607.06520
Bonart, M., Samokhina, A., Heisenberg, G., Schaer, P.: An investigation of biases in web search engine query suggestions. Online Inf. Rev. 44(2), 365–381 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1108/oir-11-2018-0341
Cai, F., de Rijke, M.: A survey of query auto completion in information retrieval. Found. Trends Inf. Retr. 10(4), 273–363 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1561/1500000055
Daniel J. Edelman Holdings, Inc.: 2020 Edelman Trust Barometer (2020). https://www.edelman.com/trustbarometer
Dean, B.: We analyzed 5 million google search results. Here’s what we learned about organic CTR (2019). https://backlinko.com/google-ctr-stats
Dev, S., Phillips, J.M.: Attenuating bias in word vectors. CoRR (2019). http://arxiv.org/abs/1901.07656
Google: How Google Fights disinformation (2019). https://kstatic.googleusercontent.com/files/388aa7d18189665e5f5579aef18e181c2d4283fb7b0d4691689dfd1bf92f7ac2ea6816e09c02eb98d5501b8e5705ead65af653cdf94071c47361821e362da55b
Hofmann, K., Mitra, B., Radlinski, F., Shokouhi, M.: An eye-tracking study of user interactions with query auto completion. In: Li, J., Wang, X.S., Garofalakis, M.N., Soboroff, I., Suel, T., Wang, M. (eds.) Proceedings of the 23rd ACM International Conference on Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, CIKM 2014, Shanghai, China, 3–7 November 2014, pp. 549–558. ACM (2014). https://doi.org/10.1145/2661829.2661922
Honnibal, M., Montani, I., Van Landeghem, S., Boyd, A.: spaCy: industrial-strength natural language processing in Python (2020). https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1212303
Houle, C.S.: The search engine manipulation effect (SEME) and its possible impact on the outcomes of elections. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. 112(33), E4512–E4521 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1419828112
Introna, L., Nissenbaum, H.: Defining the web: the politics of search engines. Computer. 33, 54–62 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1109/2.816269
Järvelin, K., Kekäläinen, J.: Cumulated gain-based evaluation of IR techniques. ACM Trans. Inf. Syst. 20(4), 422–446 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1145/582415.582418
Kulshrestha, J., et al.: Search bias quantification: investigating political bias in social media and web search. Inf. Retriev. J. 188–227 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10791-018-9341-2
Lin, J., Nogueira, R., Yates, A.: Pretrained transformers for text ranking: BERT and beyond (2020). https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.06467
Mikolov, T., Chen, K., Corrado, G., Dean, J.: Efficient estimation of word representations in vector space (2013). https://arxiv.org/abs/1301.3781
Mitra, B., Shokouhi, M., Radlinski, F., Hofmann, K.: On user interactions with query auto-completion. In: Proceedings of the 37th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research & Development in Information Retrieval, SIGIR 2014, pp. 1055–1058. Association for Computing Machinery, New York (2014). https://doi.org/10.1145/2600428.2609508
Niu, X., Kelly, D.: The use of query suggestions during information search. Inf. Process. Manag. 50(1), 218–234 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2013.09.002
Noble, S.U.: Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. NYU Press (2018). http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1pwt9w5
Olteanu, A., Diaz, F., Kazai, G.: When are search completion suggestions problematic? In: Computer Supported Collaborative Work and Social Computing (CSCW). ACM (2020)
Ooi, J., Ma, X., Qin, H., Liew, S.C.: A survey of query expansion, query suggestion and query refinement techniques. In: 4th International Conference on Software Engineering and Computer Systems (2015). https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSECS.2015.7333094
Pitoura, E., et al.: On measuring bias in online information. CoRR. vol. abs/1704.05730 (2017). http://arxiv.org/abs/1704.05730
Ray, L.: 2020 google search survey: How much do users trust their search results? (2020). https://moz.com/blog/2020-google-search-survey
Robertson, R.E., Jiang, S., Lazer, D., Wilson, C.: Auditing autocomplete: suggestion networks and recursive algorithm interrogation. In: Boldi, P., Welles, B.F., Kinder-Kurlanda, K., Wilson, C., Peters, I., Jr., W.M. (eds.) Proceedings of the 11th ACM Conference on Web Science, WebSci 2019, Boston, MA, USA, 30 June–03 July 2019, pp. 235–244. ACM (2019). https://doi.org/10.1145/3292522.3326047
Wang, P., et al.: Game of missuggestions: semantic analysis of search-autocomplete manipulations. In: NDSS (2018)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Haak, F., Schaer, P. (2021). Perception-Aware Bias Detection for Query Suggestions. In: Boratto, L., Faralli, S., Marras, M., Stilo, G. (eds) Advances in Bias and Fairness in Information Retrieval. BIAS 2021. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1418. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78818-6_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78818-6_12
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-78817-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-78818-6
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)