Towards Measuring Fairness in Speech Recognition: Casual Conversations Dataset Transcriptions

• Published in: ICASSP 2022 - 2022 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) pp. 6162 - 6166
• Main Authors: Liu, Chunxi, Picheny, Michael, Sari, Leda, Chitkara, Pooja, Xiao, Alex, Zhang, Xiaohui, Chou, Mark, Alvarado, Andres, Hazirbas, Caner, Saraf, Yatharth
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 23.05.2022
• Subjects: age; Computational modeling; Distributed databases; Error analysis; fairness; gender; skin tones; Social networking (online); Speech recognition; Training data; Visualization
• ISSN: 2379-190X
• DOI: 10.1109/ICASSP43922.2022.9747501

The problem of machine learning systems demonstrating bias towards specific groups of individuals has been studied extensively, particularly in the Facial Recognition area, but much less so in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). This paper presents initial Speech Recognition results on "Casual Conversations" - a publicly released 846 hour corpus designed to help researchers evaluate their computer vision and audio models for accuracy across a diverse set of metadata, including age, gender, and skin tone. The entire corpus has been manually transcribed, allowing for detailed ASR evaluations across these metadata. Multiple ASR models are evaluated, including models trained on LibriSpeech, 14,000 hour transcribed, and over 2 million hour untranscribed social media videos. Significant differences in word error rate across gender and skin tone are observed at times for all models. We are releasing human transcripts from the Casual Conversations dataset to encourage the community to develop a variety of techniques to reduce these statistical biases.