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Exploring author gender in book rating and recommendation

Published: 27 September 2018 Publication History

Abstract

Collaborative filtering algorithms find useful patterns in rating and consumption data and exploit these patterns to guide users to good items. Many of the patterns in rating datasets reflect important real-world differences between the various users and items in the data; other patterns may be irrelevant or possibly undesirable for social or ethical reasons, particularly if they reflect undesired discrimination, such as gender or ethnic discrimination in publishing. In this work, we examine the response of collaborative filtering recommender algorithms to the distribution of their input data with respect to a dimension of social concern, namely content creator gender. Using publicly-available book ratings data, we measure the distribution of the genders of the authors of books in user rating profiles and recommendation lists produced from this data. We find that common collaborative filtering algorithms differ in the gender distribution of their recommendation lists, and in the relationship of that output distribution to user profile distribution.

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cover image ACM Conferences
RecSys '18: Proceedings of the 12th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems
September 2018
600 pages
ISBN:9781450359016
DOI:10.1145/3240323
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 the author(s) 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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Publication History

Published: 27 September 2018

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Author Tags

  1. bias
  2. collaborative filtering
  3. discrimination
  4. user impact

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RecSys '18
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RecSys '18: Twelfth ACM Conference on Recommender Systems
October 2, 2018
British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

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RecSys '18 Paper Acceptance Rate 32 of 181 submissions, 18%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 254 of 1,295 submissions, 20%

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Average User-Side Counterfactual Fairness for Collaborative FilteringACM Transactions on Information Systems10.1145/365663942:5(1-26)Online publication date: 13-May-2024
  • (2024)Break Out of a Pigeonhole: A Unified Framework for Examining Miscalibration, Bias, and Stereotype in Recommender SystemsACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology10.1145/365004415:4(1-20)Online publication date: 29-Feb-2024
  • (2024)Measuring Commonality in Recommendation of Cultural Content to Strengthen Cultural CitizenshipACM Transactions on Recommender Systems10.1145/36431382:1(1-32)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2024
  • (2024)Path-Specific Causal Reasoning for Fairness-aware Cognitive DiagnosisProceedings of the 30th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining10.1145/3637528.3672049(4143-4154)Online publication date: 25-Aug-2024
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  • (2024)Fairness in Machine Learning: A SurveyACM Computing Surveys10.1145/361686556:7(1-38)Online publication date: 9-Apr-2024
  • (2024)Exploring and mitigating gender bias in book recommender systems with explicit feedbackJournal of Intelligent Information Systems10.1007/s10844-023-00827-8Online publication date: 25-Mar-2024
  • (2024)Personalized Vehicle Task Offloading Based on the Recommender SystemDevelopments and Applications in SmartRail, Traffic, and Transportation Engineering10.1007/978-981-97-3682-9_39(420-432)Online publication date: 14-Aug-2024
  • (2024)Modular Debiasing of Latent User Representations in Prototype-Based Recommender SystemsMachine Learning and Knowledge Discovery in Databases. Research Track10.1007/978-3-031-70341-6_4(56-72)Online publication date: 22-Aug-2024
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