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Towards Fair Speech Recognition: Mitigating Demographic Bias in End-to-End ASR Systems

Demographic bias in the performance of speech and language technology has been an active area of recent research. A lot of studies have shown the existence of demographic biases in Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems. In this work, we propose a novel model-agnostic and demographic label-agnostic approach, called DARe, to mitigate any existing bias in an ASR system towards certain speaker groups. We built a debiasing module that goes between the feature extractor of an ASR and the rest of that ASR. The module includes content-group disentanglers to separate content and group, a demographic classifier, and adversarial reweighting. To eliminate the need for demographic labels, we generated pseudo-group labels by extracting speaker embeddings and clustering them. We worked with three ASR systems–Wav2Vec2 base, SEW tiny, and Whisper small. We used the FAI dataset, which contains naturalistic conversations with speakers who self-identify their demographic attributes. We used Word Error Rate (WER) as a metric of ASR performance and a Poisson regression-based approach to evaluate the racial fairness of the models. We compared the racial bias of the models before and after applying our proposed approach and observed a significant improvement in fairness.