SD-QA: Spoken Dialectal Question Answering for the Real World
Fahim Faisal, Sharlina Keshava, Md Mahfuz Ibn Alam, Antonios Anastasopoulos
Abstract
Question answering (QA) systems are now available through numerous commercial applications for a wide variety of domains, serving millions of users that interact with them via speech interfaces. However, current benchmarks in QA research do not account for the errors that speech recognition models might introduce, nor do they consider the language variations (dialects) of the users. To address this gap, we augment an existing QA dataset to construct a multi-dialect, spoken QA benchmark on five languages (Arabic, Bengali, English, Kiswahili, Korean) with more than 68k audio prompts in 24 dialects from 255 speakers. We provide baseline results showcasing the real-world performance of QA systems and analyze the effect of language variety and other sensitive speaker attributes on downstream performance. Last, we study the fairness of the ASR and QA models with respect to the underlying user populations.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{faisal-etal-2021-sd-qa,
title = "{SD}-{QA}: Spoken Dialectal Question Answering for the Real World",
author = "Faisal, Fahim and
Keshava, Sharlina and
Alam, Md Mahfuz Ibn and
Anastasopoulos, Antonios",
editor = "Moens, Marie-Francine and
Huang, Xuanjing and
Specia, Lucia and
Yih, Scott Wen-tau",
booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021",
month = nov,
year = "2021",
address = "Punta Cana, Dominican Republic",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.281/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2021.findings-emnlp.281",
pages = "3296--3315"
}