Semantic Web technologies and bias in artificial intelligence: A systematic literature review

Bias in Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a critical and timely issue due to its sociological, economic and legal impact, as decisions made by biased algorithms could lead to unfair treatment of specific individuals or groups. Multiple surveys have emerged to provide a multidisciplinary view of bias or to review bias in specific areas such as social sciences, business research, criminal justice, or data mining. Given the ability of Semantic Web (SW) technologies to support multiple AI systems, we review the extent to which semantics can be a “tool” to address bias in different algorithmic scenarios. We provide an in-depth categorisation and analysis of bias assessment, representation, and mitigation approaches that use SW technologies. We discuss their potential in dealing with issues such as representing disparities of specific demographics or reducing data drifts, sparsity, and missing values. We find research works on AI bias that apply semantics mainly in information retrieval, recommendation and natural language processing applications and argue through multiple use cases that semantics can help deal with technical, sociological, and psychological challenges.