FAIR: Fairness-Aware Information Retrieval Evaluation

With the emerging needs of creating fairness-aware solutions for search and recommendation systems, a daunting challenge exists of evaluating such solutions. While many of the traditional information retrieval (IR) metrics can capture the relevance, diversity and novelty for the utility with respect to users, they are not suitable for inferring whether the presented results are fair from the perspective of responsible information exposure. On the other hand, various fairness metrics have been proposed but they do not account for the user utility or do not measure it adequately. To address this problem, we propose a new metric called Fairness-Aware IR (FAIR). By unifying standard IR metrics and fairness measures into an integrated metric, this metric offers a new perspective for evaluating fairness-aware ranking results. Based on this metric, we developed an effective ranking algorithm that jointly optimized user utility and fairness. The experimental results showed that our FAIR metric could highlight results with good user utility and fair information exposure. We showed how FAIR related to existing metrics and demonstrated the effectiveness of our FAIR-based algorithm. We believe our work opens up a new direction of pursuing a computationally feasible metric for evaluating and implementing the fairness-aware IR systems.