학술논문

Augmented Datasheets for Speech Datasets and Ethical Decision-Making
Document Type
Working Paper
Source
Subject
Computer Science - Computers and Society
Language
Abstract
Speech datasets are crucial for training Speech Language Technologies (SLT); however, the lack of diversity of the underlying training data can lead to serious limitations in building equitable and robust SLT products, especially along dimensions of language, accent, dialect, variety, and speech impairment - and the intersectionality of speech features with socioeconomic and demographic features. Furthermore, there is often a lack of oversight on the underlying training data - commonly built on massive web-crawling and/or publicly available speech - with regard to the ethics of such data collection. To encourage standardized documentation of such speech data components, we introduce an augmented datasheet for speech datasets, which can be used in addition to "Datasheets for Datasets". We then exemplify the importance of each question in our augmented datasheet based on in-depth literature reviews of speech data used in domains such as machine learning, linguistics, and health. Finally, we encourage practitioners - ranging from dataset creators to researchers - to use our augmented datasheet to better define the scope, properties, and limits of speech datasets, while also encouraging consideration of data-subject protection and user community empowerment. Ethical dataset creation is not a one-size-fits-all process, but dataset creators can use our augmented datasheet to reflexively consider the social context of related SLT applications and data sources in order to foster more inclusive SLT products downstream.
Comment: To appear in 2023 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (FAccT '23), June 12-15, Chicago, IL, USA