FairLENS: Assessing Fairness in Law Enforcement Speech Recognition

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) techniques have become powerful tools, enhancing efficiency in law enforcement scenarios. To ensure fairness for demographic groups in different acoustic environments, ASR engines must be tested across a variety of speakers in realistic settings. However, describing the fairness discrepancies between models with confidence remains a challenge. Meanwhile, most public ASR datasets are insufficient to perform a satisfying fairness evaluation. To address the limitations, we built FairLENS - a systematic fairness evaluation framework. We propose a novel and adaptable evaluation method to examine the fairness disparity between different models. We also collected a fairness evaluation dataset covering multiple scenarios and demographic dimensions. Leveraging this framework, we conducted fairness assessments on one open-source and eleven commercially available state-of-the-art ASR models. Our results reveal that certain models exhibit more biases than others, serving as a fairness guideline for users to make informed choices when selecting ASR models for a given real-world scenario. We further explored model biases towards specific demographic groups and observed that shifts in the acoustic domain can lead to the emergence of new biases.