Invited Speech 1: Sunday 14:30-15:30, December 17th, 2023

Abstract

Inclusive Speech Technology: Developing Automatic Speech Recognition for Everyone

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) is increasingly used, e.g., in emergency response centers, domestic voice assistants, and search engines. Because of the paramount relevance spoken language plays in our lives, it is critical that ASR systems are able to deal with the variability in the way people speak (e.g., due to speaker differences, demographics, different speaking styles, and differently abled users). ASR systems promise to deliver objective interpretation of human speech. Practice and recent evidence however suggests that the state-of-the-art ASRs struggle with the large variation in speech due to e.g., gender, age, speech impairment, race, and accents. The overarching goal in our research is to uncover bias in ASR systems to work towards proactive bias mitigation in ASR. In this talk, I will present systematic experiments aimed at quantifying, identifying the origin of, and mitigating the bias of state-of-the-art ASRs on speech from different, typically low-resource, groups of speakers, with a focus on bias against gender, age, regional accents and non-native accents.

Biography

Odette Scharenborg is an associate professor at the Department of Intelligent Systems, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands. Her research focuses on human speech-processing inspired automatic speech processing with the aim to develop inclusive speech technology, i.e., speech technology that works for everyone irrespective of how they speak or the language they speak. Odette has been a Board member of the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) since 2017, where she currently serves as Vice-President. From 2018-2022, she was a member of the IEEE SPS Speech and Language Processing Technical, and from 2019-2023, a (Senior) Associate Editor of IEEE Signal Processing Letters. She will be the General Chair of Interspeech Rotterdam, 2025.