# A Case Study of Balanced Query Recommendation on Wikipedia

**Authors:** Harshit Mishra, Sucheta Soundarajan

arXiv: 2508.20399 · 2025-08-29

## TL;DR

This paper presents an extended balanced query recommendation method for Wikipedia that optimizes for multiple biases and relevance, demonstrating its effectiveness and highlighting the influence of linguistic choices on retrieval quality.

## Contribution

The work introduces a multi-dimensional bias-aware query recommendation approach using Pareto optimization, extending previous methods to handle multiple bias types simultaneously.

## Key findings

- The extended BalancedQR effectively reduces multiple biases in query suggestions.
- Linguistic choices in queries significantly impact retrieval bias and relevance.
- The approach improves fairness without sacrificing relevance in Wikipedia search results.

## Abstract

Modern IR systems are an extremely important tool for seeking information. In addition to search, such systems include a number of query reformulation methods, such as query expansion and query recommendations, to provide high quality results. However, results returned by such methods sometimes exhibit undesirable or wrongful bias with respect to protected categories such as gender or race. Our earlier work considered the problem of balanced query recommendation, where instead of re-ranking a list of results based on fairness measures, the goal was to suggest queries that are relevant to a user's search query but exhibit less bias than the original query. In this work, we present a case study of BalancedQR using an extension of BalancedQR that handles biases in multiple dimensions. It employs a Pareto front approach that finds balanced queries, optimizing for multiple objectives such as gender bias and regional bias, along with the relevance of returned results. We evaluate the extended version of BalancedQR on a Wikipedia dataset.Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of our extension to BalancedQR framework and highlight the significant impact of subtle query wording,linguistic choice on retrieval.

## Full text

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## Figures

3 figures with captions in the complete paper: https://tomesphere.com/paper/2508.20399/full.md

## References

24 references — full list in the complete paper: https://tomesphere.com/paper/2508.20399/full.md

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Source: https://tomesphere.com/paper/2508.20399