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Building Human Values into Recommender Systems: An Interdisciplinary Synthesis
Journal article   Open access

Building Human Values into Recommender Systems: An Interdisciplinary Synthesis

Jonathan Stray, Alon Halevy, Parisa Assar, Dylan Hadfield-Menell, Craig Boutilier, Amar Ashar, Chloe Bakalar, Lex Beattie, Michael Ekstrand, Claire Leibowicz, …
ACM Transactions on Recommender Systems
13 Nov 2023
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3632297
url
https://doi.org/10.1145/3632297View
Published, Version of Record (VoR) Open

Abstract

value-sensitive design recommender systems technology policy
Recommender systems are the algorithms which select, filter, and personalize content across many of the world's largest platforms and apps. As such, their positive and negative effects on individuals and on societies have been extensively theorized and studied. Our overarching question is how to ensure that recommender systems enact the values of the individuals and societies that they serve. Addressing this question in a principled fashion requires technical knowledge of recommender design and operation, and also critically depends on insights from diverse fields including social science, ethics, economics, psychology, policy and law. This paper is a multidisciplinary effort to synthesize theory and practice from different perspectives, with the goal of providing a shared language, articulating current design approaches, and identifying open problems. We collect a set of values that seem most relevant to recommender systems operating across different domains, then examine them from the perspectives of current industry practice, measurement, product design, and policy approaches. Important open problems include multi-stakeholder processes for defining values and resolving trade-offs, better values-driven measurements, recommender controls that people use, non-behavioral algorithmic feedback, optimization for long-term outcomes, causal inference of recommender effects, academic-industry research collaborations, and interdisciplinary policy-making.

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