Beyond the binary: Limitations and possibilities of gender-related speech technology research
This work highlights critical terminology and conceptual issues in speech technology research that could negatively impact marginalized groups, though it is incremental as a review paper.
The paper reviewed 107 Interspeech publications on gender-related speech technology from 2013 to 2023, finding a scarcity of research and widespread underspecified or binary use of gender terminology that misaligns with social science views of gender as a social spectrum, which risks harming marginalized groups.
This paper presents a review of 107 research papers relating to speech and sex or gender in ISCA Interspeech publications between 2013 and 2023. We note the scarcity of work on this topic and find that terminology, particularly the word gender, is used in ways that are underspecified and often out of step with the prevailing view in social sciences that gender is socially constructed and is a spectrum as opposed to a binary category. We draw attention to the potential problems that this can cause for already marginalised groups, and suggest some questions for researchers to ask themselves when undertaking work on speech and gender.