# Deep F-measure Maximization for End-to-End Speech Understanding Source: [Deep F-measure Maximization for End-to-End Speech Understanding]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2025-10-25T22:29:00.055Z Authors: Leda Sar{\\i}, Mark Hasegawa-Johnson Published: 2020-08-08T03:02:27.000Z ## Abstract Spoken language understanding (SLU) datasets, like many other machine learning datasets, usually suffer from the label imbalance problem. Label imbalance usually causes the learned model to replicate similar biases at the output which raises the issue of unfairness to the minority classes in the dataset. In this work, we approach the fairness problem by maximizing the F-measure instead of accuracy in neural network model training. We propose a differentiable approximation to the F-measure and train the network with this objective using standard backpropagation. We perform experiments on two standard fairness datasets, Adult, and Communities and Crime, and also on speech-to-intent detection on the ATIS dataset and speech-to-image concept classification on the Speech-COCO dataset. In all four of these tasks, F-measure maximization results in improved micro-F1 scores, with absolute improvements of up to 8% absolute, as compared to models trained with the cross-entropy loss function. In the two multi-class SLU tasks, the proposed approach significantly improves class coverage, i.e., the number of classes with positive recall. ## Recorded benchmark results A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage. ## Original sources and implementation [Original paper]() [PDF]()