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Fairness-Aware Question Answering for Intelligent Assistants

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Sachin Pathiyan CherumanalAuthors Info & Claims

SIGIR '22: Proceedings of the 45th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval

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https://doi.org/10.1145/3477495.3531682

Published: 07 July 2022 Publication History

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Abstract

Conversational intelligent assistants, such as Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple Siri, are a form of voice-only Question Answering (QA) system and have the potential to address complex information needs. However, at the moment they are mostly limited to answering with facts expressed in a few words. For example, when a user asks Google Assistant if coffee is good for their health, it responds by justifying why it is good for their health without shedding any light on the side effects coffee consumption might have \citegao2020toward. Such limited exposure to multiple perspectives can lead to change in perceptions, preferences, and attitude of users, as well as to the creation and reinforcement of undesired cognitive biases. Getting such QA systems to provide a fair exposure to complex answers -- including those with opposing perspectives -- is an open research problem. In this research, I aim to address the problem of fairly exposing multiple perspectives and relevant answers to users in a multi-turn conversation without negatively impacting user satisfaction.

References

[1]

Ruoyuan Gao and Chirag Shah. 2020. Toward Creating a Fairer Ranking in Search Engine Results. Information Processing & Management, Vol. 57, 1 (2020), 102138. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ipm.2019.102138

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[2]

Sachin Pathiyan Cherumanal, Damiano Spina, Falk Scholer, and W. Bruce Croft. 2021. Evaluating Fairness in Argument Retrieval. In Proc. CIKM. 3363--3367. https://doi.org/10.1145/3459637.3482099

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Sachin Payhiyan Cherumnala, Damiano Spina, Falk Scholer, and W. Bruce Croft. 2022. RMIT at TREC 2021 Fair Ranking Track. In Proc. TREC . https://trec.nist.gov/pubs/trec30/papers/RMIT-IR-F.pdf

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Piotr Sapiezynski, Wesley Zeng, Ronald E Robertson, Alan Mislove, and Christo Wilson. 2019. Quantifying the Impact of User Attention on Fair Group Representation in Ranked Lists. In Proc. WWW. 553--562. https://doi.org/10.1145/3308560.3317595

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Ke Yang and Julia Stoyanovich. 2017. Measuring Fairness in Ranked Outputs. In Proc. SSDBM. Article 22, https://doi.org/10.1145/3085504.3085526

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Cited By

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Ji KPathiyan Cherumanal STrippas JHettiachchi DSalim FScholer FSpina D(2024)Towards Detecting and Mitigating Cognitive Bias in Spoken Conversational SearchAdjunct Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Mobile Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/3640471.3680245(1-10)Online publication date: 21-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3640471.3680245
Brewer RHarrington CHeldreth C(2023)Envisioning Equitable Speech Technologies for Black Older AdultsProceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency10.1145/3593013.3594005(379-388)Online publication date: 12-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3593013.3594005

Index Terms

Fairness-Aware Question Answering for Intelligent Assistants
1. Information systems
  1. Information retrieval
    1. Evaluation of retrieval results

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Published In

SIGIR '22: Proceedings of the 45th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval

July 2022

3569 pages

ISBN:9781450387323

DOI:10.1145/3477495

General Chairs:
Enrique Amigo
UNED
,
Pablo Castells
UAM and Amazon
,
Julio Gonzalo
UNED
,
Program Chairs:
Ben Carterette
Spotify
,
J. Shane Culpepper
RMIT University
,
Gabriella Kazai
Waseda University

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

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Published: 07 July 2022

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SIGIR '22: The 45th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval

July 11 - 15, 2022

Madrid, Spain

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Ji KPathiyan Cherumanal STrippas JHettiachchi DSalim FScholer FSpina D(2024)Towards Detecting and Mitigating Cognitive Bias in Spoken Conversational SearchAdjunct Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Mobile Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/3640471.3680245(1-10)Online publication date: 21-Sep-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3640471.3680245
Brewer RHarrington CHeldreth C(2023)Envisioning Equitable Speech Technologies for Black Older AdultsProceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency10.1145/3593013.3594005(379-388)Online publication date: 12-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3593013.3594005

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Quality-aware collaborative question answering: methods and evaluation

Question Rewriting for Conversational Question Answering

First International Workshop on Conversational Approaches to Information Retrieval (CAIR'17)

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