Perception-Aware Bias Detection for Query Suggestions

Bias in web search has been in the spotlight of bias detection research for quite a while. At the same time, little attention has been paid to query suggestions in this regard. Awareness of the problem of biased query suggestions has been raised. Likewise, there is a rising need for automatic bias detection approaches. This paper adds on the bias detection pipeline for bias detection in query suggestions of person-related search developed by Bonart et al. The sparseness and lack of contextual metadata of query suggestions make them a difficult subject for bias detection. Furthermore, query suggestions are perceived very briefly and subliminally. To overcome these issues, perception-aware metrics are introduced. Consequently, the enhanced pipeline is able to better detect systematic topical bias in search engine query suggestions for person-related searches. The results of an analysis performed with the developed pipeline confirm this assumption. Due to the perception-aware bias detection metrics, findings produced by the pipeline can be assumed to reflect bias that users would discern.