SD-QA: Spoken Dialectal Question Answering for the Real World

Fahim Faisal, Sharlina Keshava, Md Mahfuz Ibn Alam, Antonios Anastasopoulos
2021 Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021   unpublished
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
more » ... anguages (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. 1
doi:10.18653/v1/2021.findings-emnlp.281 fatcat:fjhzgyc2nbfe5m5hkfuohvvl2m