Dialect and Gender Bias in YouTube's Spanish Captioning System
This highlights a fairness issue for Spanish speakers on digital platforms, though it is incremental as it builds on existing evidence of algorithmic bias.
The study investigated biases in YouTube's Spanish automatic captioning system across dialects and genders, finding systematic disparities in caption quality for female and male speakers from different regions.
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.