Social Biases in Knowledge Representations of Wikidata separates Global North from Global South

Knowledge Graphs have become increasingly popular due to their wide usage in various downstream applications, including information retrieval, chatbot development, language model construction, and many others.Link prediction (LP) is a crucial downstream task for knowledge graphs, as it helps to address the problem of the incompleteness of the knowledge graphs.However, previous research has shown that knowledge graphs, often created in a (semi) automatic manner, are not free from social biases.These biases can have harmful effects on downstream applications, especially by leading to unfair behavior toward minority groups.To understand this issue in detail, we develop a framework -AuditLP -deploying fairness metrics to identify biased outcomes in LP, specifically how occupations are classified as either male or female-dominated based on gender as a sensitive attribute.We have experimented with the sensitive attribute of age and observed that occupations are categorized as young-biased, old-biased, and age-neutral.We conduct our experiments on a large number of knowledge triples that belong to 21 different geographies extracted from the opensourced knowledge graph, Wikidata.Our study shows that the variance in the biased outcomes across geographies neatly mirrors the socio-economic and cultural division of the world, resulting in a transparent partition of the Global North from the Global South.

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Publication Details

Published
2025-05-19
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1145/3717867.3717882
Citations
2
Primary Topic
Wikis in Education and Collaboration
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
7.73
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article

Social Biases in Knowledge Representations of Wikidata separates Global North from Global South

Sai Keerthana Karnam, Animesh Mukherjee, Paramita Das, Aditya Bharat Soni
2 citations
Wikis in Education and Collaboration
7.73
article

Social Biases in Knowledge Representations of Wikidata separates Global North from Global South

Sai Keerthana Karnam, Animesh Mukherjee, Paramita Das, Aditya Bharat Soni
article en
2 citations

Abstract

Knowledge Graphs have become increasingly popular due to their wide usage in various downstream applications, including information retrieval, chatbot development, language model construction, and many others.Link prediction (LP) is a crucial downstream task for knowledge graphs, as it helps to address the problem of the incompleteness of the knowledge graphs.However, previous research has shown that knowledge graphs, often created in a (semi) automatic manner, are not free from social biases.These biases can have harmful effects on downstream applications, especially by leading to unfair behavior toward minority groups.To understand this issue in detail, we develop a framework -AuditLP -deploying fairness metrics to identify biased outcomes in LP, specifically how occupations are classified as either male or female-dominated based on gender as a sensitive attribute.We have experimented with the sensitive attribute of age and observed that occupations are categorized as young-biased, old-biased, and age-neutral.We conduct our experiments on a large number of knowledge triples that belong to 21 different geographies extracted from the opensourced knowledge graph, Wikidata.Our study shows that the variance in the biased outcomes across geographies neatly mirrors the socio-economic and cultural division of the world, resulting in a transparent partition of the Global North from the Global South.

Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur (IN), Carnegie Mellon University (US)
Openalex Percentile: Top 4%
Wikis in Education and Collaboration
7.73
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