Abstract
Spanish is the official language of twenty-one countries and is spoken by over 441 million people. Naturally, there are many variations in how Spanish is spoken across these countries. Media platforms such as YouTube rely on automatic speech recognition systems to make their content accessible to different groups of users. However, YouTube offers only one option for automatically generating captions in Spanish. This raises the question: could this captioning system be biased against certain Spanish dialects? This study examines the potential biases in YouTube's automatic captioning system by analyzing its performance across various Spanish dialects. By comparing the quality of captions for female and male speakers from different regions, we identify systematic disparities which can be attributed to specific dialects. Our study provides further evidence that algorithmic technologies deployed on digital platforms need to be calibrated to the diverse needs and experiences of their user populations.
Abstract (translated)
西班牙是二十一个国家的官方语言，全球有超过4亿4100万人使用这种语言。然而，在这些国家中，西班牙语的口音和用法存在许多差异。像YouTube这样的媒体平台依赖自动语音识别系统来为其用户提供可访问的内容。但是，YouTube仅提供一种自动生成西班牙语字幕的选择。这引发了这样一个问题：该字幕生成系统是否会对某些西班牙语方言产生偏见？本研究通过分析YouTube的自动字幕系统在不同西班牙语方言中的表现，探讨其潜在的偏见。我们通过对来自不同地区的女性和男性的演讲者产生的字幕质量进行比较，识别出可以归因于特定方言的系统性差异。我们的研究表明，在线平台部署的算法技术需要针对用户群体多样化的需要和体验进行校准。
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.24002
