On the Legal Compatibility of Fairness Definitions
Abstract
Past literature has been effective in demonstrating ideological gaps in machine learning (ML) fairness definitions when considering their use in complex socio-technical systems. However, we go further to demonstrate that these definitions often misunderstand the legal concepts from which they purport to be inspired, and consequently inappropriately co-opt legal language. In this paper, we demonstrate examples of this misalignment and discuss the differences in ML terminology and their legal counterparts, as well as what both the legal and ML fairness communities can learn from these tensions. We focus this paper on U.S. anti-discrimination law since the ML fairness research community regularly references terms from this body of law.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.1912.00761,
title = {On the Legal Compatibility of Fairness Definitions},
author = {Alice Xiang and Inioluwa Deborah Raji},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1912.00761},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
6 pages, Workshop on Human-Centric Machine Learning at the 33rd Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2019)