mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Quantifying Bias in Automatic Speech Recognition

arXiv 2103.15122 ↗First posted 28 Mar 2021eess.AS cs.CL cs.SDcited by 50

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Abstract (arXiv)

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems promise to deliver objective interpretation of human speech. Practice and recent evidence suggests that the state-of-the-art (SotA) ASRs struggle with the large variation in speech due to e.g., gender, age, speech impairment, race, and accents. Many factors can cause the bias of an ASR system. Our overarching goal is to uncover bias in ASR systems to work towards proactive bias mitigation in ASR. This paper is a first step towards this goal and systematically quantifies the bias of a Dutch SotA ASR system against gender, age, regional accents and non-native accents. Word error rates are compared, and an in-depth phoneme-level error analysis is conducted to understand where bias is occurring. We primarily focus on bias due to articulation differences in the dataset. Based on our findings, we suggest bias mitigation strategies for ASR development.

Key facts. Cited by 50 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 4 of its 26 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 28 Mar 2021.

Builds on

4 of 26 references.

References · 4

  1. 2016Semantics derived automatically from language corpora contain human-like biasescited by 894
  2. 2015MUSAN: A Music, Speech, and Noise Corpuscited by 400
  3. 2019Gender Representation in French Broadcast Corpora and Its Impact on ASR Performancecited by 23
  4. 2020See what I'm saying? Comparing Intelligent Personal Assistant use for Native and Non-Native Language Speakerscited by 7

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2021: 2; 2022: 6; 2023: 12; 2024: 12; 2025: 5; 2026: 13.

50 papers.

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  1. 2021SciCap: Generating Captions for Scientific Figurescited by 76
  2. 2022Representation Bias in Data: A Survey on Identification and Resolution Techniquescited by 37
  3. 2023Can Whisper perform speech-based in-context learning?cited by 35
  4. 2022Toward Fairness in Speech Recognition: Discovery and mitigation of performance disparitiescited by 27
  5. 2023Bias and Fairness in Chatbots: An Overviewcited by 20
  6. 2024Listen and Speak Fairly: A Study on Semantic Gender Bias in Speech Integrated Large Language Modelscited by 20
  7. 2022Hey ASR System! Why Aren't You More Inclusive? Automatic Speech Recognition Systems' Bias and Proposed Bias Mitigation Techniques. A Literature Reviewcited by 19
  8. 2024Lost in Transcription: Identifying and Quantifying the Accuracy Biases of Automatic Speech Recognition Systems Against Disfluent Speechcited by 15
  9. 2024Spoken Stereoset: On Evaluating Social Bias Toward Speaker in Speech Large Language Modelscited by 15
  10. 2022A Study of Gender Impact in Self-supervised Models for Speech-to-Text Systemscited by 14
  11. 2023Allophant: Cross-lingual Phoneme Recognition with Articulatory Attributescited by 13
  12. 2023Improving Fairness and Robustness in End-to-End Speech Recognition through unsupervised clusteringcited by 11
38 more
  1. 2023Pre-trained Speech Processing Models Contain Human-Like Biases that Propagate to Speech Emotion Recognitioncited by 9
  2. 2024FairSSD: Understanding Bias in Synthetic Speech Detectorscited by 9
  3. 2024The Balancing Act: Unmasking and Alleviating ASR Biases in Portuguesecited by 6
  4. 2024Sonos Voice Control Bias Assessment Dataset: A Methodology for Demographic Bias Assessment in Voice Assistantscited by 6
  5. 2021Pathological voice adaptation with autoencoder-based voice conversioncited by 5
  6. 2022Casual Conversations v2: Designing a large consent-driven dataset to measure algorithmic bias and robustnesscited by 5
  7. 2023Towards dialect-inclusive recognition in a low-resource language: are balanced corpora the answer?cited by 5
  8. 2023A Deep Dive into the Disparity of Word Error Rates Across Thousands of NPTEL MOOC Videoscited by 5
  9. 2025Voice, Bias, and Coreference: An Interpretability Study of Gender in Speech Translationcited by 5
  10. 2023No Pitch Left Behind: Addressing Gender Unbalance in Automatic Speech Recognition through Pitch Manipulationcited by 4
  11. 2022Better Transcription of UK Supreme Court Hearingscited by 3
  12. 2023Debiased Automatic Speech Recognition for Dysarthric Speech via Sample Reweighting with Sample Affinity Testcited by 3
  13. 2024AccentFold: A Journey through African Accents for Zero-Shot ASR Adaptation to Target Accentscited by 3
  14. 2024DENOASR: Debiasing ASRs through Selective Denoisingcited by 3
  15. 2025SeniorTalk: A Chinese Conversation Dataset with Rich Annotations for Super-Aged Seniorscited by 3
  16. 2023Using Data Augmentations and VTLN to Reduce Bias in Dutch End-to-End Speech Recognition Systemscited by 2
  17. 2024On the Role of Speech Data in Reducing Toxicity Detection Biascited by 2
  18. 2025Addressing Pitfalls in Auditing Practices of Automatic Speech Recognition Technologies: A Case Study of People with Aphasiacited by 2
  19. 2023Synthetic Cross-accent Data Augmentation for Automatic Speech Recognitioncited by 1
  20. 2023Considerations for Ethical Speech Recognition Datasetscited by 1
  21. 2024Dialetto, ma Quanto Dialetto? Transcribing and Evaluating Dialects on a Continuumcited by 1
  22. 2024Hard-Synth: Synthesizing Diverse Hard Samples for ASR using Zero-Shot TTS and LLMcited by 1
  23. 2025LID Models are Actually Accent Classifiers: Implications and Solutions for LID on Accented Speechcited by 1
  24. 2026ASKD-Whisper: Adaptive Self-knowledge Distillation for Efficient and Low-Latency Automatic Speech Recognitioncited by 1
  25. 2026Ethio-ASR: Joint Multilingual Speech Recognition and Language Identification for Ethiopian Languagescited by 1
  26. 2026Identifying and typifying demographic unfairness in phoneme-level embeddings of self-supervised speech recognition modelscited by 1
  27. 2026Responsible Benchmarking of Fairness for Automatic Speech Recognitioncited by 1
  28. 2024Everyone deserves their voice to be heard: Analyzing Predictive Gender Bias in ASR Models Applied to Dutch Speech Datacited by 0
  29. 2025Speak Your Mind: The Speech Continuation Task as a Probe of Voice-Based Model Biascited by 0
  30. 2026Unheard in the Digital Age: Rethinking AI Bias and Speech Diversitycited by 0
  31. 2026Dialect and Gender Bias in YouTube's Spanish Captioning Systemcited by 0
  32. 2026"OK Aura, Be Fair With Me": Demographics-Agnostic Training for Bias Mitigation in Wake-up Word Detectioncited by 0
  33. 2026Demographic and Linguistic Bias Evaluation in Omnimodal Language Modelscited by 0
  34. 2026"This Wasn't Made for Me": Recentering User Experience and Emotional Impact in the Evaluation of ASR Biascited by 0
  35. 2026Evaluating Bias in Phoneme-Based Automatic Speech Recognition Systems: An Analysis of IPA Transcription Modelscited by 0
  36. 2026A Probe Shift Is Not a Fairness Fix: The Limits of Representation Steering in Speech Modelscited by 0
  37. 2026Benchmarking Automatic Speech Recognition Tools for Iberian Languagescited by 0
  38. 2026Pruning for Efficiency, Paying in Fairness: Demographic Disparities in Pruned Speech-LLMscited by 0