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Main Authors: Krishnan, Aravind, Abdullah, Badr M., Klakow, Dietrich
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.09855
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author Krishnan, Aravind
Abdullah, Badr M.
Klakow, Dietrich
author_facet Krishnan, Aravind
Abdullah, Badr M.
Klakow, Dietrich
contents While existing literature relies on performance differences to uncover gender biases in ASR models, a deeper analysis is essential to understand how gender is encoded and utilized during transcript generation. This work investigates the encoding and utilization of gender in the latent representations of two transformer-based ASR models, Wav2Vec2 and HuBERT. Using linear erasure, we demonstrate the feasibility of removing gender information from each layer of an ASR model and show that such an intervention has minimal impacts on the ASR performance. Additionally, our analysis reveals a concentration of gender information within the first and last frames in the final layers, explaining the ease of erasing gender in these layers. Our findings suggest the prospect of creating gender-neutral embeddings that can be integrated into ASR frameworks without compromising their efficacy.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_09855
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle On the Encoding of Gender in Transformer-based ASR Representations
Krishnan, Aravind
Abdullah, Badr M.
Klakow, Dietrich
Computation and Language
While existing literature relies on performance differences to uncover gender biases in ASR models, a deeper analysis is essential to understand how gender is encoded and utilized during transcript generation. This work investigates the encoding and utilization of gender in the latent representations of two transformer-based ASR models, Wav2Vec2 and HuBERT. Using linear erasure, we demonstrate the feasibility of removing gender information from each layer of an ASR model and show that such an intervention has minimal impacts on the ASR performance. Additionally, our analysis reveals a concentration of gender information within the first and last frames in the final layers, explaining the ease of erasing gender in these layers. Our findings suggest the prospect of creating gender-neutral embeddings that can be integrated into ASR frameworks without compromising their efficacy.
title On the Encoding of Gender in Transformer-based ASR Representations
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.09855