Multilingual Speech Models for Automatic Speech Recognition Exhibit Gender Performance Gaps

arXiv:2402.17954v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Current voice recognition approaches use multi-task, multilingual models for speech tasks like Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) to make them applicable to many languages without substantial changes. However, broad language coverage can still mask performance gaps within languages, for example, across genders. We systematically evaluate multilingual ASR systems on gendered performance gaps. Using two popular models on three datasets in 19 languages across seven language families, we find clear gender disparities. However, the advantaged group varies …

arxiv automatic speech recognition cs.cl gender multilingual performance recognition speech speech recognition type