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        <title>A Sociophonetic Analysis of Racial Bias in Commercial ASR Systems Using the Pacific Northwest English Corpus</title>
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            <title>Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference</title>
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    <abstract>This paper presents a systematic evaluation of racial bias in four major commercial automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems using the Pacific Northwest English (PNWE) corpus. We analyze transcription accuracy across speakers from four ethnic backgrounds (African American, Caucasian American, ChicanX, and Yakama) and examine how sociophonetic variation contributes to differential system performance. We introduce a heuristically-determined Phonetic Error Rate (PER) metric that links recognition errors to specific linguistically motivated variables derived from sociophonetic annotation. Our analysis of eleven sociophonetic features reveals that vowel quality variation, particularly resistance to the low-back merger and pre-nasal merger patterns, is systematically associated with differential error rates across ethnic groups, with the most pronounced effects for African American speakers across all evaluated systems. These findings demonstrate that acoustic modeling of dialectal phonetic variation, rather than lexical or syntactic factors, remains a primary source of bias in commercial ASR systems. The study establishes the PNWE corpus as a valuable resource for bias evaluation in speech technologies and provides actionable guidance for improving ASR performance through targeted representation of sociophonetic diversity in training data.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T A Sociophonetic Analysis of Racial Bias in Commercial ASR Systems Using the Pacific Northwest English Corpus
%A Scott, Michael
%A Liang, Siyu
%A Wassink, Alicia
%A Levow, Gina-Anne
%Y Piperidis, Stelios
%Y Bel, Núria
%Y van den Heuvel, Henk
%Y Ide, Nancy
%Y Krek, Simon
%Y Toral, Antonio
%S Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
%D 2026
%8 May
%I ELRA Language Resource Association
%C Palma de Mallorca, Spain
%F scott-etal-2026-sociophonetic
%X This paper presents a systematic evaluation of racial bias in four major commercial automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems using the Pacific Northwest English (PNWE) corpus. We analyze transcription accuracy across speakers from four ethnic backgrounds (African American, Caucasian American, ChicanX, and Yakama) and examine how sociophonetic variation contributes to differential system performance. We introduce a heuristically-determined Phonetic Error Rate (PER) metric that links recognition errors to specific linguistically motivated variables derived from sociophonetic annotation. Our analysis of eleven sociophonetic features reveals that vowel quality variation, particularly resistance to the low-back merger and pre-nasal merger patterns, is systematically associated with differential error rates across ethnic groups, with the most pronounced effects for African American speakers across all evaluated systems. These findings demonstrate that acoustic modeling of dialectal phonetic variation, rather than lexical or syntactic factors, remains a primary source of bias in commercial ASR systems. The study establishes the PNWE corpus as a valuable resource for bias evaluation in speech technologies and provides actionable guidance for improving ASR performance through targeted representation of sociophonetic diversity in training data.
%R 10.63317/4qkgjt7n9ehb
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.lrec-1.376/
%U https://doi.org/10.63317/4qkgjt7n9ehb
%P 4787-4796

Markdown (Informal)

[A Sociophonetic Analysis of Racial Bias in Commercial ASR Systems Using the Pacific Northwest English Corpus](https://aclanthology.org/2026.lrec-1.376/) (Scott et al., LREC 2026)

• A Sociophonetic Analysis of Racial Bias in Commercial ASR Systems Using the Pacific Northwest English Corpus (Scott et al., LREC 2026)

ACL

• Michael Scott, Siyu Liang, Alicia Wassink, and Gina-Anne Levow. 2026. A Sociophonetic Analysis of Racial Bias in Commercial ASR Systems Using the Pacific Northwest English Corpus. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 4787–4796, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.