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  4. Controlling Polarization in Personalization: An Algorithmic Framework
 
conference paper

Controlling Polarization in Personalization: An Algorithmic Framework

Celis, L. Elisa
•
Kapoor, Sayash
•
Salehi, Farnood  
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January 1, 2019
Fat*'19: Proceedings Of The 2019 Conference On Fairness, Accountability, And Transparency
ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAT)

Personalization is pervasive in the online space as it leads to higher efficiency for the user and higher revenue for the platform by individualizing the most relevant content for each user. However, recent studies suggest that such personalization can learn and propagate systemic biases and polarize opinions; this has led to calls for regulatory mechanisms and algorithms that are constrained to combat bias and the resulting echo-chamber effect. We propose a versatile framework that allows for the possibility to reduce polarization in personalized systems by allowing the user to constrain the distribution from which content is selected. We then present a scalable algorithm with provable guarantees that satisfies the given constraints on the types of the content that can be displayed to a user, but- subject to these constraints- will continue to learn and personalize the content in order to maximize utility. We illustrate this framework on a curated dataset of online news articles that are conservative or liberal, show that it can control polarization, and examine the trade-off between decreasing polarization and the resulting loss to revenue. We further exhibit thefl exibility and scalability of our approach by framing the problem in terms of the more general diverse content selection problem and test it empirically on both a News dataset and the MovieLens dataset.

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Type
conference paper
DOI
10.1145/3287560.3287601
Web of Science ID

WOS:000473814700017

Author(s)
Celis, L. Elisa
Kapoor, Sayash
Salehi, Farnood  
Vishnoi, Nisheeth  
Date Issued

2019-01-01

Publisher

ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY

Publisher place

New York

Published in
Fat*'19: Proceedings Of The 2019 Conference On Fairness, Accountability, And Transparency
ISBN of the book

978-1-4503-6125-5

Start page

160

End page

169

Subjects

personalization

•

recommender systems

•

polarization

•

bandit optimization

•

group fairness

•

diversification

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
THL3  
INDY2  
Event nameEvent placeEvent date
ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAT)

Atlanta, GA

Jan 29-31, 2019

Available on Infoscience
July 17, 2019
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/159176
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