MuPe Life Stories Dataset: Spontaneous Speech in Brazilian Portuguese with a Case Study Evaluation on ASR Bias against Speakers Groups and Topic Modeling
Sidney Evaldo Leal, Arnaldo Candido Junior, Ricardo Marcacini, Edresson Casanova, Odilon Gonçalves, Anderson Silva Soares, Rodrigo Freitas Lima, Lucas Rafael Stefanel Gris
Abstract
Recently, several public datasets for automatic speech recognition (ASR) in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) have been released, improving ASR systems performance. However, these datasets lack diversity in terms of age groups, regional accents, and education levels. In this paper, we present a new publicly available dataset consisting of 289 life story interviews (365 hours), featuring a broad range of speakers varying in age, education, and regional accents. First, we demonstrated the presence of bias in current BP ASR models concerning education levels and age groups. Second, we showed that our dataset helps mitigate these biases. Additionally, an ASR model trained on our dataset performed better during evaluation on a diverse test set. Finally, the ASR model trained with our dataset was extrinsically evaluated through a topic modeling task that utilized the automatically transcribed output.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{evaldo-leal-etal-2025-mupe,
title = "{M}u{P}e Life Stories Dataset: Spontaneous Speech in {B}razilian {P}ortuguese with a Case Study Evaluation on {ASR} Bias against Speakers Groups and Topic Modeling",
author = "Evaldo Leal, Sidney and
Candido Junior, Arnaldo and
Marcacini, Ricardo and
Casanova, Edresson and
Gon{\c{c}}alves, Odilon and
Silva Soares, Anderson and
Freitas Lima, Rodrigo and
Stefanel Gris, Lucas Rafael and
Alu{\'i}sio, Sandra",
editor = "Rambow, Owen and
Wanner, Leo and
Apidianaki, Marianna and
Al-Khalifa, Hend and
Eugenio, Barbara Di and
Schockaert, Steven",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics",
month = jan,
year = "2025",
address = "Abu Dhabi, UAE",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.407/",
pages = "6076--6087"
}