Past research has identified discriminatory automatic speech recognition (ASR) performance as a function of the racial group and nationality of the speaker. In this paper, we expand the discussion beyond bias as a function of the individual national origin of the speaker to look for bias as a function of the geopolitical orientation of their nation of origin. We audit some of the most popular English language ASR services using a large and global data set of speech from The Speech Accent Archive, which includes over 2,700 speakers of English born in 171 different countries. We show that, even when controlling for multiple linguistic covariates, ASR service performance has a statistically significant relationship to the political alignment of the speaker's birth country with respect to the United States' geopolitical power. This holds for all ASR services tested. We discuss this bias in the context of the historical use of language to maintain global and political power.

翻译：过去的研究发现，自动语音识别（ASR）性能因说话者的种族群体和国籍不同而存在歧视性表现。本文进一步扩展讨论，将偏见从说话者个体出生国的影响拓展至其出生国地缘政治取向的影响。我们利用《语音口音档案》中涵盖全球范围的大规模语音数据集对多款主流英语ASR服务进行审计，该数据集包含来自171个国家的2700余名英语使用者。研究表明，即使在控制多个语言协变量的情况下，ASR服务性能与说话者出生国相对于美国地缘政治权力的政治立场仍存在统计显著关联。这一结论适用于所有被测试的ASR服务。本文结合语言在历史上被用于维护全球政治权力的背景，对该偏见进行了探讨。