Skip to main content

A Light-Weight Strategy for Restraining Gender Biases in Neural Rankers

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Advances in Information Retrieval (ECIR 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13186))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

In light of recent studies that show neural retrieval methods may intensify gender biases during retrieval, the objective of this paper is to propose a simple yet effective sampling strategy for training neural rankers that would allow the rankers to maintain their retrieval effectiveness while reducing gender biases. Our work proposes to consider the degrees of gender bias when sampling documents to be used for training neural rankers. We report our findings on the MS MARCO collection and based on different query datasets released for this purpose in the literature. Our results show that the proposed light-weight strategy can show competitive (or even better) performance compared to the state-of-the-art neural architectures specifically designed to reduce gender biases.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 89.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 119.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.sbert.net/.

  2. 2.

    https://github.com/aminbigdeli/bias_aware_neural_ranking.

References

  1. Baeza-Yates, R.: Bias on the web. Commun. ACM 61(6), 54–61 (2018)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Baeza-Yates, R.: Bias in search and recommender systems. In: Fourteenth ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, pp. 2–2 (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  3. Bigdeli, A., Arabzadeh, N., Seyersalehi, S., Zihayat, M., Bagheri, E.: On the orthogonality of bias and utility in ad hoc retrieval. In: Proceedings of the 44rd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (2021)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Bigdeli, A., Arabzadeh, N., Zihayat, M., Bagheri, E.: Exploring gender biases in information retrieval relevance judgement datasets. In: Hiemstra, D., Moens, M.-F., Mothe, J., Perego, R., Potthast, M., Sebastiani, F. (eds.) ECIR 2021. LNCS, vol. 12657, pp. 216–224. Springer, Cham (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72240-1_18

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  5. Caliskan, A., Bryson, J.J., Narayanan, A.: Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biases. Science 356(6334), 183–186 (2017)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Clark, K., Luong, M.T., Le, Q.V., Manning, C.D.: Electra: pre-training text encoders as discriminators rather than generators. arXiv preprint arXiv:2003.10555 (2020)

  7. Devlin, J., Chang, M.W., Lee, K., Toutanova, K.: BERT: pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding. arXiv preprint arXiv:1810.04805 (2018)

  8. Fabris, A., Purpura, A., Silvello, G., Susto, G.A.: Gender stereotype reinforcement: measuring the gender bias conveyed by ranking algorithms. Inf. Process. Manage. 57(6), 102–377 (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Font, J.E., Costa-Jussa, M.R.: Equalizing gender biases in neural machine translation with word embeddings techniques. arXiv preprint arXiv:1901.03116 (2019)

  10. Gao, L., Callan, J.: Unsupervised corpus aware language model pre-training for dense passage retrieval. arXiv preprint arXiv:2108.05540 (2021)

  11. Gao, L., Dai, Z., Callan, J.: Coil: revisit exact lexical match in information retrieval with contextualized inverted list. arXiv preprint arXiv:2104.07186 (2021)

  12. Gerritse, E.J., Hasibi, F., de Vries, A.P.: Bias in conversational search: the double-edged sword of the personalized knowledge graph. In: Proceedings of the 2020 ACM SIGIR on International Conference on Theory of Information Retrieval, pp. 133–136 (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Han, S., Wang, X., Bendersky, M., Najork, M.: Learning-to-rank with BERT in TF-ranking. arXiv preprint arXiv:2004.08476 (2020)

  14. Izacard, G., Grave, E.: Leveraging passage retrieval with generative models for open domain question answering. arXiv preprint arXiv:2007.01282 (2020)

  15. Karpukhin, V., OÄŸuz, B., Min, S., Lewis, P., Wu, L., Edunov, S., Chen, D., Yih, W.T.: Dense passage retrieval for open-domain question answering. arXiv preprint arXiv:2004.04906 (2020)

  16. Macdonald, C., Tonellotto, N.: On approximate nearest neighbour selection for multi-stage dense retrieval. arXiv preprint arXiv:2108.11480 (2021)

  17. Nguyen, T., et al.: Ms marco: a human generated machine reading comprehension dataset. In: CoCo@ NIPS (2016)

    Google Scholar 

  18. Nogueira, R., Cho, K.: Passage re-ranking with BERT. arXiv preprint arXiv:1901.04085 (2019)

  19. Olteanu, A., et al.: Facts-IR: fairness, accountability, confidentiality, transparency, and safety in information retrieval. In: ACM SIGIR Forum, vol. 53, pp. 20–43. ACM New York, NY, USA (2021)

    Google Scholar 

  20. Pradeep, R., Nogueira, R., Lin, J.: The expando-mono-duo design pattern for text ranking with pretrained sequence-to-sequence models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2101.05667 (2021)

  21. Qu, Y., et al.: RocketQA: an optimized training approach to dense passage retrieval for open-domain question answering. In: Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pp. 5835–5847 (2021)

    Google Scholar 

  22. Rekabsaz, N., Kopeinik, S., Schedl, M.: Societal biases in retrieved contents: measurement framework and adversarial mitigation for BERT rankers. arXiv preprint arXiv:2104.13640 (2021)

  23. Rekabsaz, N., Schedl, M.: Do neural ranking models intensify gender bias? In: Proceedings of the 43rd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, pp. 2065–2068 (2020)

    Google Scholar 

  24. Sanh, V., Debut, L., Chaumond, J., Wolf, T.: Distilbert, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter. arXiv preprint arXiv:1910.01108 (2019)

  25. Sun, T., et al.: Mitigating gender bias in natural language processing: literature review. arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.08976 (2019)

  26. Turc, I., Chang, M.W., Lee, K., Toutanova, K.: Well-read students learn better: on the importance of pre-training compact models. arXiv preprint arXiv:1908.08962 (2019)

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Amin Bigdeli .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

About this paper

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this paper

Bigdeli, A., Arabzadeh, N., Seyedsalehi, S., Zihayat, M., Bagheri, E. (2022). A Light-Weight Strategy for Restraining Gender Biases in Neural Rankers. In: Hagen, M., et al. Advances in Information Retrieval. ECIR 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13186. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99739-7_6

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99739-7_6

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-99738-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-99739-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics