Considerations for Ethical Speech Recognition Datasets
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.