Exploring Data Augmentation in Bias Mitigation Against Non-Native-Accented Speech
Y. Zhang (TU Delft - Multimedia Computing)
Aaricia Herygers (External organisation)
T.B. Patel (TU Delft - Multimedia Computing)
Z. Yue (TU Delft - Multimedia Computing)
Odette Scharenborg (TU Delft - Multimedia Computing)
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Abstract
Automatic speech recognition (ASR) should serve every speaker, not only the majority “standard” speakers of a language. In order to build inclusive ASR, mitigating the bias against speaker groups who speak in a “non-standard” or “diverse” way is crucial. We aim to mitigate the bias against non-native-accented Flemish in a Flemish ASR system. Since this is a low-resource problem, we investigate the optimal type of data augmentation, i.e., speed/pitch perturbation, cross-lingual voice conversion-based methods, and SpecAugment, applied to both native Flemish and non-native-accented Flemish, for bias mitigation. The results showed that specific types of data augmentation applied to both native and non-native-accented speech improve non-native-accented ASR while applying data augmentation to the non-native-accented speech is more conducive to bias reduction. Combining both gave the largest bias reduction for human-machine interaction (HMI) as well as read-type speech.