Towards the Human-Centered Study of Recommender System Providers

Abstract

Providers are essential stakeholders in recommender systems, but they have been under-studied in the recommender systems field. While prior work has examined topics of fairness and diversity in ways that represent provider-side concerns, so far the field has resisted conceptualizing providers as users and applying human-centered methods to understand and improve their experience. We identify five areas for future study required to bring providers into the fold as first-class users of recommender systems: impacts, interfaces, explanation, governance, and design. We propose concrete research questions for study, referencing existing work in RecSys and adjacent fields.