MuPe Life Stories Dataset: Spontaneous Speech in Brazilian Portuguese with a Case Study Evaluation on ASR Bias against Speakers Groups and Topic Modeling

Sidney Evaldo Leal, Arnaldo Cândido Júnior, Ricardo M. Marcacini, Edresson Casanova, Odilon Gonçalves, Anderson da Silva Soares, Rodrigo Lima, Lucas Rafael Stefanel Gris, Sandra M. Aluísio

Abstract: Recently, several public datasets for automatic speech recognition (ASR) in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) have been released, improving ASR systems performance. However, these datasets lack diversity in terms of age groups, regional accents, and education levels. In this paper, we present a new publicly available dataset consisting of 289 life story interviews (365 hours), featuring a broad range of speakers varying in age, education, and regional accents. First, we demonstrated the presence of bias in current BP ASR models concerning education levels and age groups. Second, we showed that our dataset helps mitigate these biases. Additionally, an ASR model trained on our dataset performed better during evaluation on a diverse test set. Finally, the ASR model trained with our dataset was extrinsically evaluated through a topic modeling task that utilized the automatically transcribed output.