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Allison Koenecke
Allison Koenecke

Cornell Tech

When

March 5, 2026 at 6:25:00 PM

Where

Addressing Pitfalls in Auditing Practices of Automatic Speech Recognition Technologies

Abstract

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) has transformed daily tasks ranging from video captioning to medical note-taking. ASR systems' growing use warrants robust and standardized auditing approaches to ensure automated transcriptions of high and equitable quality. We identify three pitfalls in existing standard ASR auditing procedures, and demonstrate how addressing them impacts audit results via a case study focused on patients with a language disorder, aphasia. First, audits often adhere to a single method of text standardization during data pre-processing, which (a) masks variability in ASR performance from applying different standardization methods, and (b) may not be consistent with how users -- especially those from marginalized speech communities -- would want their transcriptions to be standardized. Second, audits often display high-level demographic findings without further considering performance disparities among (a) more nuanced demographic subgroups, and (b) relevant covariates capturing acoustic information from the input audio. Third, audits often rely on a single gold-standard metric -- the Word Error Rate -- which does not fully capture the extent of errors arising from generative AI models, such as transcription hallucinations. We propose a more holistic auditing framework that accounts for these three pitfalls, exemplify its results in our case study, and propose a path forward for implementing robust ASR auditing practices -- with a particular focus on medical applications.

About

Allison Koenecke is an assistant professor of information science at Cornell Tech and the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science. Her research on algorithmic fairness applies computational methods, such as machine learning and causal inference, to study societal inequities in domains from online services to public health.

Koenecke previously held a postdoctoral researcher role at Microsoft Research and received her Ph.D. from Stanford’s Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering. She is the recipient of several NSF grants and a Cornell CIS DEIB Faculty of the Year Award, and has been honored as a Sloan Fellow in Computer Science and a Forbes 30 Under 30 lister in Science.

Koenecke is regularly quoted as an expert on disparities in automated speech-to-text systems. She has been featured in prominent news outlets, including the New York Times, the Associated Press, the Atlantic, Forbes, Business Insider, Wired, and Scientific American. Her work has been published in venues including Nature, PNAS, NeurIPS, and FAccT.

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