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Quantifying Bias in Automatic Speech Recognition

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arxiv 2103.15122 v2 pith:OV73LV5U submitted 2021-03-28 eess.AS cs.CLcs.SD

Quantifying Bias in Automatic Speech Recognition

classification eess.AS cs.CLcs.SD
keywords biasspeechaccentsautomaticerrorgendergoalmitigation
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems promise to deliver objective interpretation of human speech. Practice and recent evidence suggests that the state-of-the-art (SotA) ASRs struggle with the large variation in speech due to e.g., gender, age, speech impairment, race, and accents. Many factors can cause the bias of an ASR system. Our overarching goal is to uncover bias in ASR systems to work towards proactive bias mitigation in ASR. This paper is a first step towards this goal and systematically quantifies the bias of a Dutch SotA ASR system against gender, age, regional accents and non-native accents. Word error rates are compared, and an in-depth phoneme-level error analysis is conducted to understand where bias is occurring. We primarily focus on bias due to articulation differences in the dataset. Based on our findings, we suggest bias mitigation strategies for ASR development.

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Cited by 9 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Toward Fair Speech Technologies: A Comprehensive Survey of Bias and Fairness in Speech AI

    eess.AS 2026-05 accept novelty 7.0

    The paper delivers a unified framework for fairness in speech technologies by formalizing seven definitions, organizing research into three paradigms, diagnosing pipeline-specific biases, and mapping mitigations to th...

  2. "This Wasn't Made for Me": Recentering User Experience and Emotional Impact in the Evaluation of ASR Bias

    cs.CL 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    ASR bias causes users from underrepresented dialects to internalize failures as personal inadequacy and perform extensive emotional and linguistic labor, revealing harms missed by accuracy-only evaluations.

  3. Voice, Bias, and Coreference: An Interpretability Study of Gender in Speech Translation

    cs.CL 2025-11 conditional novelty 7.0

    ST models override masculine ILM biases with acoustic input, using first-person pronouns to link terms to the speaker and accessing gender cues across the full frequency spectrum rather than pitch alone.

  4. Speak Your Mind: The Speech Continuation Task as a Probe of Voice-Based Model Bias

    eess.AS 2025-09 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    The authors perform the first systematic bias evaluation in speech continuation tasks across three models, revealing gender interactions in text metrics and stronger reversion to modal phonation for female prompts.

  5. Vaani Benchmark V1.0: An Inclusive Multimodal Benchmark Dataset for Hindi

    eess.AS 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Vaani Benchmark V1.0 is a multimodal Hindi ASR dataset from 104 districts featuring spontaneous speech recordings in real-world conditions and three independent transcriptions per segment for robust multi-reference ev...

  6. Evaluating Bias in Phoneme-Based Automatic Speech Recognition Systems: An Analysis of IPA Transcription Models

    cs.CL 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Evaluation of WhisperIPA and ZIPA reveals persistent performance gaps across languages, accents, gender, ethnicity, and age even after allowing for similar phoneme substitutions.

  7. Few-Shot Synthetic Accented Speech for ASR Fine-Tuning: What Helps and When?

    cs.SD 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Random phoneme substitutions recover most ASR gains from synthetic accented speech, with targeted edits and ground-truth prosody providing only marginal additional benefits.

  8. Few-Shot Synthetic Accented Speech for ASR Fine-Tuning: What Helps and When?

    cs.SD 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Few-shot TTS adaptation combined with LLM-guided phoneme editing produces synthetic accented speech that improves ASR word error rates on real accented audio even in cross-speaker and ultra-low-data settings.

  9. Demographic and Linguistic Bias Evaluation in Omnimodal Language Models

    cs.CV 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Omnimodal models show reduced demographic bias in image and video tasks compared to substantial biases and lower performance in audio tasks.