Responsible Benchmarking of Fairness for Automatic Speech Recognition

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Herron, Felix, Richard, Ange, Portet, François, Allauzen, Alexandre, Rossato, Solange
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866914554059948032
author Herron, Felix
Richard, Ange
Portet, François
Allauzen, Alexandre
Rossato, Solange
author_facet Herron, Felix
Richard, Ange
Portet, François
Allauzen, Alexandre
Rossato, Solange
contents Many studies have shown automatic speech processing (ASR) systems have unequal performance across speakergroups (SG's). However, the manner in which such studies arrive at this conclusion is inconsistent. To pave the wayfor more reliable results in future studies, we lay out best practices for benchmarking ASR fairness based on literaturefrom machine learning fairness, social sciences, and speech science. We first describe the importance of preciselythe fairness hypothesis being interrogated, and tailoring fairness metrics to apply specifically to said hypothesis.We then examine several benchmarks used to rate ASR systems on fairness and discuss how their results can bemisconstrued without assiduous oversight into the intersections between SG's. We find that evaluating fairnessbased on single heterogeneous SG's, such as they are defined in fairness benchmarks, can lead to misidentifyingwhich SG's are actually being mistreated by ASR systems. We advocate for as fine-grained an analysis as possibleof the intersectionality of as many demographic variables as are available in the metadata of fairness corpora in orderto tease out such spurious correlations
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_10615
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Responsible Benchmarking of Fairness for Automatic Speech Recognition
Herron, Felix
Richard, Ange
Portet, François
Allauzen, Alexandre
Rossato, Solange
Computation and Language
Many studies have shown automatic speech processing (ASR) systems have unequal performance across speakergroups (SG's). However, the manner in which such studies arrive at this conclusion is inconsistent. To pave the wayfor more reliable results in future studies, we lay out best practices for benchmarking ASR fairness based on literaturefrom machine learning fairness, social sciences, and speech science. We first describe the importance of preciselythe fairness hypothesis being interrogated, and tailoring fairness metrics to apply specifically to said hypothesis.We then examine several benchmarks used to rate ASR systems on fairness and discuss how their results can bemisconstrued without assiduous oversight into the intersections between SG's. We find that evaluating fairnessbased on single heterogeneous SG's, such as they are defined in fairness benchmarks, can lead to misidentifyingwhich SG's are actually being mistreated by ASR systems. We advocate for as fine-grained an analysis as possibleof the intersectionality of as many demographic variables as are available in the metadata of fairness corpora in orderto tease out such spurious correlations
title Responsible Benchmarking of Fairness for Automatic Speech Recognition
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.10615