De-Speakerizing Accented ASR: Measuring and Mitigating Speaker Entanglement for Fair, Reliable Recognition

Abstract This research statement proposes to measure and mitigate speaker entanglement, where accent features inadvertently encode who is speaking in accented automatic speech recognition (ASR). We argue that entanglement inflates scores under lenient split for the same speaker and worsens fairness gaps across accents, and we outline a parameter-efficient mitigation that combines adversarial de-speakerization with safe conditioning. The plan is grounded in established results in accented ASR, domain-adversarial learning, and parameter-efficient fine-tuning; it is feasible with public datasets and a frozen Whisper backbone, and can potentially guide low-resource data collection.