# Considerations for Ethical Speech Recognition Datasets

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.02081 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02081/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 11 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 May 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Robust Speech Recognition via Large-Scale Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.04356/) (2022)
- [wav2vec 2.0: A Framework for Self-Supervised Learning of Speech Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11477/) (2020)
- [VoxPopuli: A Large-Scale Multilingual Speech Corpus for Representation Learning, Semi-Supervised Learning and Interpretation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00390/) (2021)
- [GigaSpeech: An Evolving, Multi-domain ASR Corpus with 10,000 Hours of Transcribed Audio](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06909/) (2021)
- [Quantifying Bias in Automatic Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.15122/) (2021)
- [Mitigating Dataset Harms Requires Stewardship: Lessons from 1000 Papers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02922/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Toward Responsible ASR for African American English Speakers: A Scoping Review of Bias and Equity in Speech Technology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18288/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Speech AI Technologies are largely trained on publicly available datasets or by the massive web-crawling of speech. In both cases, data acquisition focuses on minimizing collection effort, without necessarily taking the data subjects' protection or user needs into consideration. This results to models that are not robust when used on users who deviate from the dominant demographics in the training set, discriminating individuals having different dialects, accents, speaking styles, and disfluencies. In this talk, we use automatic speech recognition as a case study and examine the properties that ethical speech datasets should possess towards responsible AI applications. We showcase diversity issues, inclusion practices, and necessary considerations that can improve trained models, while facilitating model explainability and protecting users and data subjects. We argue for the legal & privacy protection of data subjects, targeted data sampling corresponding to user demographics & needs, appropriate meta data that ensure explainability & accountability in cases of model failure, and the sociotechnical & situated model design. We hope this talk can inspire researchers & practitioners to design and use more human-centric datasets in speech technologies and other domains, in ways that empower and respect users, while improving machine learning models' robustness and utility.