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arXiv · 2505.02352

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

Paramita Das·Sai Keerthana Karnam·Aditya Soni·Animesh Mukherjee
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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 open-sourced 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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Paramita Das, Sai Keerthana Karnam, Aditya Soni, Animesh Mukherjee. 2025-05-05. Social Biases in Knowledge Representations of Wikidata separates Global North from Global South. https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.02352

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