Artie Bias Corpus: An Open Dataset for Detecting Demographic Bias in Speech Applications

Josh Meyer, Lindy Rauchenstein, Joshua D. Eisenberg, Nicholas Howell


Abstract
We describe the creation of the Artie Bias Corpus, an English dataset of expert-validated <audio, transcript> pairs with demographic tags for age, gender, accent. We also release open software which may be used with the Artie Bias Corpus to detect demographic bias in Automatic Speech Recognition systems, and can be extended to other speech technologies. The Artie Bias Corpus is a curated subset of the Mozilla Common Voice corpus, which we release under a Creative Commons CC0 license – the most open and permissive license for data. This article contains information on the criteria used to select and annotate the Artie Bias Corpus in addition to experiments in which we detect and attempt to mitigate bias in end-to-end speech recognition models. We we observe a significant accent bias in our baseline DeepSpeech model, with more accurate transcriptions of US English compared to Indian English. We do not, however, find evidence for a significant gender bias. We then show significant improvements on individual demographic groups from fine-tuning.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.796
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
6462–6468
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.796
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Josh Meyer, Lindy Rauchenstein, Joshua D. Eisenberg, and Nicholas Howell. 2020. Artie Bias Corpus: An Open Dataset for Detecting Demographic Bias in Speech Applications. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 6462–6468, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Artie Bias Corpus: An Open Dataset for Detecting Demographic Bias in Speech Applications (Meyer et al., LREC 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.796.pdf
Data
Artie Bias Corpus