Toward Automatic Group Membership Annotation for Group Fairness Evaluation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Chen, Fumian, Yang, Dayu, Fang, Hui
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Chen, Fumian
Yang, Dayu
Fang, Hui
author_facet Chen, Fumian
Yang, Dayu
Fang, Hui
contents With the increasing research attention on fairness in information retrieval systems, more and more fairness-aware algorithms have been proposed to ensure fairness for a sustainable and healthy retrieval ecosystem. However, as the most adopted measurement of fairness-aware algorithms, group fairness evaluation metrics, require group membership information that needs massive human annotations and is barely available for general information retrieval datasets. This data sparsity significantly impedes the development of fairness-aware information retrieval studies. Hence, a practical, scalable, low-cost group membership annotation method is needed to assist or replace human annotations. This study explored how to leverage language models to automatically annotate group membership for group fairness evaluations, focusing on annotation accuracy and its impact. Our experimental results show that BERT-based models outperformed state-of-the-art large language models, including GPT and Mistral, achieving promising annotation accuracy with minimal supervision in recent fair-ranking datasets. Our impact-oriented evaluations reveal that minimal annotation error will not degrade the effectiveness and robustness of group fairness evaluation. The proposed annotation method reduces tremendous human efforts and expands the frontier of fairness-aware studies to more datasets.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_08926
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Toward Automatic Group Membership Annotation for Group Fairness Evaluation
Chen, Fumian
Yang, Dayu
Fang, Hui
Information Retrieval
With the increasing research attention on fairness in information retrieval systems, more and more fairness-aware algorithms have been proposed to ensure fairness for a sustainable and healthy retrieval ecosystem. However, as the most adopted measurement of fairness-aware algorithms, group fairness evaluation metrics, require group membership information that needs massive human annotations and is barely available for general information retrieval datasets. This data sparsity significantly impedes the development of fairness-aware information retrieval studies. Hence, a practical, scalable, low-cost group membership annotation method is needed to assist or replace human annotations. This study explored how to leverage language models to automatically annotate group membership for group fairness evaluations, focusing on annotation accuracy and its impact. Our experimental results show that BERT-based models outperformed state-of-the-art large language models, including GPT and Mistral, achieving promising annotation accuracy with minimal supervision in recent fair-ranking datasets. Our impact-oriented evaluations reveal that minimal annotation error will not degrade the effectiveness and robustness of group fairness evaluation. The proposed annotation method reduces tremendous human efforts and expands the frontier of fairness-aware studies to more datasets.
title Toward Automatic Group Membership Annotation for Group Fairness Evaluation
topic Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.08926