Fairness in automated data journalism systems

Abstract

Automated data journalism is an application of computing and artificial intelligence (AI) that aims to create stories from raw data, possibly in a variety of formats (such as visuals or text). Conventionally, a variety of methodologies and tools, including statistical software packages and data visualization tools have been used to generate stories from raw data. Artificial intelligence, and particularly machine learning techniques have recently been introduced because they can handle more complex data and scale more easily to larger datasets. However, AI techniques may raise a number of ethical concerns such as an unfair presentation which typically occurs due to bias. Stories that contains unfair presentation could be destructive at individual and societal levels; they could also damage the reputation of news providers. In this paper we study an existing framework of automated journalism and enhance the framework to make it aware of fairness concern. We present various steps of the framework where bias enters into the production of a story and address the causes and effects of different types of biases.