Are you looking for a challenging position in a dynamic setting? The Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication (
ACLC) currently has a vacant PhD position as part of the UvA-wide project
Language Sciences for Social Good, led by principal investigators Floris Roelofsen, Paul Boersma and Antal van den Bosch.
The ACLC is one of the five Research Schools within the
Amsterdam Institute for Humanities Research. Within the University of Amsterdam, the ACLC represents the thriving linguistics community. The ACLC is home to several research groups. The current project falls under the DeepFon research group. The ACLC prioritises diversity (taken in a holistic sense, e.g., ethnicity, social and/or linguistic background, gender, sexuality) and is committed to creating an inclusive research environment.
What are you going to do?You will develop new methods for automatic speech recognition that can be applied to languages and language variants for which only small amounts of training data are available. This mainly concerns diverse regional and socio-ethnic varieties of Dutch, but also regional languages such as Frisian, Twents, Limburgian and West-Flemish.
The research will be driven by fundamental scientific questions in the realm of speech technology as well as by applied questions, predominantly from the security domain. An important subquestion will be whether speech or language models that are based on data from small numbers of speakers can lead to unintended biases or to identifiability of the speakers, and how to deal with such issues. The parties (University and TNO) intend to publish all results open access and open source, in accordance with UvA and NWO guidelines.
You will be supported by a supervising team consisting of a phonetician and a language technologist, both with extensive knowledge of the Dutch linguistic situation, as well as by researchers at TNO, where you will be work one day per week on location. For a more detailed preliminary project description, contact the chair of the selection committee.
Tasks and responsibilities:
- submission of a PhD thesis within the period of appointment;
- participating in meetings of the relevant research groups;
- assembling a comprehensive database of training data from various sources;
- publishing multiple peer-reviewed articles, of which at least one single-authored;
- presenting intermediate research results at workshops and conferences;
- organising knowledge dissemination activities;
- participation in the Research School and Faculty of Humanities PhD training programmes.