28.2232, Support: Computational Linguistics; Language Acquisition; Phonetics: PhD, Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Wed May 17 13:40:31 UTC 2017

LINGUIST List: Vol-28-2232. Wed May 17 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 28.2232, Support: Computational Linguistics; Language Acquisition; Phonetics: PhD, Vrije Universiteit Brussel

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Date: Wed, 17 May 2017 09:40:29
From: Bart de Boer [bart at ai.vub.ac.be]
Subject: Computational Linguistics; Language Acquisition; Phonetics: PhD, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium

 Institution/Organization: Vrije Universiteit Brussel 
Department: Artificial Intelligence Lab 
Web Address: http://ai.vub.ac.be/ 

Level: PhD 

Duties: Research,Project Work

Specialty Areas: Computational Linguistics; Language Acquisition; Phonetics 

Description:

PhD on modelling acquisition of combinatorial speech

We are looking for someone who has (or who is about to complete) a master’s
degree in artificial intelligence, speech technology, computer science or
equivalent. You will work on a project that investigates advanced techniques
for learning the building blocks of speech, with a focus on spectro-temporal
features and dynamic Bayesian networks. It is part of the Artificial
Intelligence lab of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and is supervised by prof.
Bart de Boer.

The PhD project:
Speech consists of a limited number of building blocks that are combined into
an essentially unlimited number of words. Children acquire the building blocks
and the rules to combine them effortlessly. Although modern speech technology,
especially that based on deep learning, has made great progress on this task,
it still needs much more training data than children do. This PhD project
explores the hypothesis that a fundamental problem of speech technology is the
separation of spectral (often modeled by MFCCs) and temporal features (often
modeled by HMMs). It will investigate an alternative where spectro-temporal
features are used, with a learning technique that is based on dynamic Bayesian
networks.

Requirements:
- Either one of (and preferably both) a. Knowledge of speech processing; b.
Knowledge of Bayesian techniques, especially dynamic Bayesian networks
- Good programming skills, preferably experience with C++11
- An affinity with cognitive and linguistic questions is an advantage

Conditions:
You apply for a four-year PhD scholarship, the exact amount of which depends
on your experience, but which is sufficient to live comfortably in Brussels.
There is also some additional money to visit conferences and for research
costs. You will work in an international and interdisciplinary research group.
The group is part of the computer science department, but it investigates
questions about (the evolution of) cognition and language, using a combination
of experiment and computer modeling. You will be asked to do a limited amount
of teaching and supervision, but that will take up no more than 20% of your
working time. As part of your PhD project, you will have the possibility to
spend a few months at a different institute. The envisaged starting date is
October 1st, 2017

How to Apply:
We need a letter of motivation, a CV, a copy of your master’s thesis (or in
case you have not completed this, another sample of your writing), a list of
your grades and the contact information of two people who can provide
references. Please send these in pdf format to Bart de Boer:
bart at arti.vub.ac.be mentioning “DBN PhD” in the subject. For inquiries, you
can send a message to this same address, or phone +32 2 629 3755.

Application Deadline: 01-Jul-2017 

Mailing Address for Applications:
	Attn: prof Bart de Boer 
	Pleinlaan 2 
	Vrije Universiteit Brussel, dienst ARTI 
	Brussels 1050 
	Belgium 

Web Address for Applications: https://ai.vub.ac.be/PhD_Spectrotemporal_DBN 

Contact Information: 
	prof Bart de Boer 
	bart at ai.vub.ac.be  

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