Evaluation of Off-the-shelf Speech Recognizers on Different Accents in a Dialogue Domain

Divya Tadimeti, Kallirroi Georgila, David Traum


Abstract
We evaluate several publicly available off-the-shelf (commercial and research) automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems on dialogue agent-directed English speech from speakers with General American vs. non-American accents. Our results show that the performance of the ASR systems for non-American accents is considerably worse than for General American accents. Depending on the recognizer, the absolute difference in performance between General American accents and all non-American accents combined can vary approximately from 2% to 12%, with relative differences varying approximately between 16% and 49%. This drop in performance becomes even larger when we consider specific categories of non-American accents indicating a need for more diligent collection of and training on non-native English speaker data in order to narrow this performance gap. There are performance differences across ASR systems, and while the same general pattern holds, with more errors for non-American accents, there are some accents for which the best recognizer is different than in the overall case. We expect these results to be useful for dialogue system designers in developing more robust inclusive dialogue systems, and for ASR providers in taking into account performance requirements for different accents.
Anthology ID:
2022.lrec-1.645
Volume:
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
June
Year:
2022
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, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
6001–6008
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.645
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Divya Tadimeti, Kallirroi Georgila, and David Traum. 2022. Evaluation of Off-the-shelf Speech Recognizers on Different Accents in a Dialogue Domain. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 6001–6008, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Evaluation of Off-the-shelf Speech Recognizers on Different Accents in a Dialogue Domain (Tadimeti et al., LREC 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.645.pdf