A Systematic Literature Review on Bias Evaluation and Mitigation in Automatic Speech Recognition Models for Low-Resource African Languages
Bibliographic record
Abstract
With recent advancements in speech recognition, it is crucial to ensure that automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems do not exhibit systematic biases, such as those related to gender, age, accent, and dialect. Although research has extensively examined systematic biases such as those related to gender, age, accent, and dialect, for high-resource languages, research on low-resource African languages remains limited. This systematic literature review synthesizes evidence on bias evaluation and mitigation in ASR models for African languages, adhering to the PRISMA reporting guidelines. Our analysis reveals that most biases stem from data imbalances and limited linguistic diversity in training datasets, resulting in disproportionately high error rates for underrepresented speaker groups. Mitigation strategies in African contexts have primarily focused on data-centric methods, including dataset expansion, augmentation, and transfer learning. In contrast, more advanced approaches, including fairness-aware modeling, bias-aware loss functions, adversarial debiasing, and speaker-adaptive techniques, are rarely applied. Gender, accent, and dialect biases dominate the few African studies available, while age and racial biases are almost absent. The limited number of African languages covered highlights the urgent need for more representative and inclusive research. Addressing these gaps will support the development of fairer and more robust ASR technologies across the continent.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.031 | 0.145 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".