[Corpora-List] JOBS: Research Associates, Cambridge University - Machine Translation, Speech Recognition

[Bill Byrne]

Research Associates
Speech and Language Processing
Department of Engineering
University of Cambridge

A number of positions are available for Research Associates and for  
exceptionally well-qualified candidates for Senior Research  
Associates to work on a project funded by the DARPA Global Autonomous  
Language Exploitation (GALE) program. The aim of GALE is to develop  
and apply speech and language processing technologies to recognise,  
analyse and translate large volumes of speech and text in multiple  
languages.  A wide range of research areas will be pursued including:  
improving the word error rate of conventional speech recognition  
systems; extracting additional acoustic and linguistic meta-data from  
acoustic data to aid recognition and translation; improving  
statistical machine translation; integration of speech recognition  
and machine translation. The work will use, and extend, the existing  
state-of-the-art large vocabulary recognition systems and statistical  
machine translation systems developed at Cambridge University.  For  
further details, and to obtain an application form, see

http://mi.eng.cam.ac.uk/research/projects/AGILE/index.html

This is an opportunity to work in a research group which has a world- 
leading reputation in speech recognition and statistical machine  
translation research.  There are excellent opportunities for  
publications, travel and conference visits. The group has outstanding  
research facilities. For suitably qualified candidates there may also  
be the chance to contribute to the MPhil in Computer Speech, Text and  
Internet Technology (http://mi.eng.cam.ac.uk/cstit/).

Candidates must have a very good first degree in a relevant  
discipline and preferably have a higher degree. Since the project  
will use and extend the HTK toolkit (http://htk.eng.cam.ac.uk) and  
the translation  template model system, a good knowledge of C or C++  
is required.  In addition, experience in one or more of the following  
technical areas is a distinct advantage:
           -  machine translation;
           -  weighted finite state machines;
           -  machine learning and statistical pattern processing  
techniques;
           -  language modelling for large vocabulary speech  
recognition;
           -  speech recognition with the HTK toolkit.
As two of the target languages are Arabic and Mandarin, fluency in  
either of these languages would be an advantage.

The project started on 1 September 2005 and has a five year duration,  
depending on satisfactory milestone completion. Appointments will be  
made for up to two years in the first instance with the expectation  
of continuation subject to the yearly renewal of the project and  
satisfactory performance.  Salary on appointment will be in the range  
from £20,235 to £30,607 for Research Associates and £31,525 to  
£39,935 for Senior Research Associates.

A letter of application and a CV should be sent to Alex Outhwaite,  
Department of Engineering, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, CB2 1PZ,  
(Tel +44 01223 766972, Fax +44 01223 332662, email  
afo20 at eng.cam.ac.uk), so as to reach her not later than 18th  
September 2006.