SD-QA: Spoken Dialectal Question Answering for the Real World

Fahim Faisal, Sharlina Keshava, Md Mahfuz Ibn Alam, Antonios Anastasopoulos


Abstract
Question answering (QA) systems are now available through numerous commercial applications for a wide variety of domains, serving millions of users that interact with them via speech interfaces. However, current benchmarks in QA research do not account for the errors that speech recognition models might introduce, nor do they consider the language variations (dialects) of the users. To address this gap, we augment an existing QA dataset to construct a multi-dialect, spoken QA benchmark on five languages (Arabic, Bengali, English, Kiswahili, Korean) with more than 68k audio prompts in 24 dialects from 255 speakers. We provide baseline results showcasing the real-world performance of QA systems and analyze the effect of language variety and other sensitive speaker attributes on downstream performance. Last, we study the fairness of the ASR and QA models with respect to the underlying user populations.
Anthology ID:
2021.findings-emnlp.281
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3296–3315
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.281
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.findings-emnlp.281
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Fahim Faisal, Sharlina Keshava, Md Mahfuz Ibn Alam, and Antonios Anastasopoulos. 2021. SD-QA: Spoken Dialectal Question Answering for the Real World. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021, pages 3296–3315, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
SD-QA: Spoken Dialectal Question Answering for the Real World (Faisal et al., Findings 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.281.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.281.mp4
Code
 ffaisal93/sd-qa
Data
Natural QuestionsTyDiQA