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When Voice Matters: Evidence of Gender Disparity in Positional Bias of SpeechLLMs
KTH, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), Intelligent systems, Speech, Music and Hearing, TMH.ORCID iD: 0009-0000-0554-7265
KTH, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), Intelligent systems, Speech, Music and Hearing, TMH.ORCID iD: 0000-0002-1643-1054
KTH, School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), Intelligent systems, Speech, Music and Hearing, TMH.ORCID iD: 0000-0003-1175-840X
2026 (English)In: Speech and Computer - 27th International Conference, SPECOM 2025, Proceedings, Springer Nature , 2026, p. 25-38Conference paper, Published paper (Refereed)
Abstract [en]

The rapid development of SpeechLLM-based conversational AI systems has created a need for robustly benchmarking these efforts, including aspects of fairness and bias. At present, such benchmarks typically rely on multiple choice question answering (MCQA). In this paper, we present the first token-level probabilistic evaluation and response-based study of several issues affecting the use of MCQA in SpeechLLM benchmarking: 1) we examine how model temperature and prompt design affect gender and positional bias on an MCQA gender-bias benchmark; 2) we examine how these biases are affected by the gender of the input voice; and 3) we study to what extent observed trends carry over to a second gender-bias benchmark. Our results show that concerns about positional bias from the text domain are equally valid in the speech domain. We also find the effect to be stronger for female voices than for male voices. To our knowledge, this is the first study to isolate positional bias effects in SpeechLLM-based gender-bias benchmarks. We conclude that current MCQA benchmarks do not account for speech-based bias and alternative strategies are needed to ensure fairness towards all users.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Springer Nature , 2026. p. 25-38
Keywords [en]
Benchmark robustness, Positional bias, SpeechLLMs
National Category
Natural Language Processing
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-372782DOI: 10.1007/978-3-032-07956-5_2Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-105020237079OAI: oai:DiVA.org:kth-372782DiVA, id: diva2:2015316
Conference
27th International Conference on Speech and Computer, SPECOM 2025, Szeged, Hungary, October 13-15, 2025
Note

Part of ISBN 9783032079558

QC 20251120

Available from: 2025-11-20 Created: 2025-11-20 Last updated: 2025-11-20Bibliographically approved

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Bokkahalli Satish, Shree HarshaHenter, Gustav EjeSzékely, Éva

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Bokkahalli Satish, Shree HarshaHenter, Gustav EjeSzékely, Éva
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