Title
Seamless equal accuracy ratio for inclusive CTC speech recognition
Abstract
Concerns have been raised regarding performance disparity in automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems as they provide unequal transcription accuracy for different user groups defined by different attributes that include gender, dialect, and race. In this paper, we propose “equal accuracy ratio”, a novel inclusiveness measure for ASR systems that can be seamlessly integrated into the standard connectionist temporal classification (CTC) training pipeline of an end-to-end neural speech recognizer to increase the recognizer’s inclusiveness. We also create a novel multi-dialect benchmark dataset to study the inclusiveness of ASR, by combining data from existing corpora in seven dialects of English (African American, General American, Latino English, British English, Indian English, Afrikaaner English, and Xhosa English). Experiments on this multi-dialect corpus show that using the equal accuracy ratio as a regularization term along with CTC loss, succeeds in lowering the accuracy gap between user groups and reduces the recognition error rate compared with a non-regularized baseline. Experiments on additional speech corpora that have different user groups also confirm our findings.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1016/j.specom.2021.11.004
Speech Communication
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Speech recognition,Fairness
Journal
136
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
0167-6393
1
0.37
References 
Authors
1
9
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Heting Gao110.37
Xiaoxuan Wang210.37
Sunghun Kang310.37
Rusty Mina410.37
Dias Issa510.71
John B. Harvill610.37
Leda Sari753.52
Mark Hasegawa-Johnson810.37
Chang D. Yoo910.71