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Addressing Gender-related Performance Disparities in Neural Rankers

Published: 07 July 2022 Publication History

Abstract

While neural rankers continue to show notable performance improvements over a wide variety of information retrieval tasks, there have been recent studies that show such rankers may intensify certain stereotypical biases. In this paper, we investigate whether neural rankers introduce retrieval effectiveness (performance) disparities over queries related to different genders. We specifically study whether there are significant performance differences between male and female queries when retrieved by neural rankers. Through our empirical study over the MS MARCO collection, we find that such performance disparities are notable and that the performance disparities may be due to the difference between how queries and their relevant judgements are collected and distributed for different gendered queries. More specifically, we observe that male queries are more closely associated with their relevant documents compared to female queries and hence neural rankers are able to more easily learn associations between male queries and their relevant documents. We show that it is possible to systematically balance relevance judgment collections in order to reduce performance disparity between different gendered queries without negatively compromising overall model performance.

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MP4 File (sigir22-1951.mp4)
In this video we have presented the paper "Addressing Gender-related Performance Disparities in Neural Rankers". We first quantify any possible differences between the retrieval effectiveness shown by neural rankers between queries from different genders, then explore why neural rankers may exhibit different retrieval effectiveness for queries from different genders, and finally offer a systematic approach to alleviate any differences between the retrieval effectiveness of gendered queries.

References

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    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
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 07 July 2022

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    Author Tags

    1. gender bias
    2. information retrieval
    3. neural rankers
    4. responsible-ai

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