4 PhD positions in spoken dialogue systems research

Applications are invited for 4 PhD fellowships in the area of
statistical spoken dialogue systems funded by the Czech Government.
The students will join the Institute of Formal and Applied
Linguistics, Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic with an
anticipated start date of October 1st, 2012.

Topic description: In recent years, it has been suggested that
statistical approach to spoken dialogue system offer a framework to
naturally handle inherent uncertainty in the human speech. The two
main advantages of statistical methods are increased robustness in
noisy conditions and more natural behaviour learned from data.
However, the current methods need large corpora effectively preventing
these methods to be used for complex dialogue systems occurring in
real-life. The successful PhD candidates will investigate and
implement statistical models and methods with the aim of increasing
the efficiency of the learning process and reducing the need for large
corpora. The conducted research will cover areas of spoken language
understanding, dialogue management, and natural language processing.

Skills: Candidates should hold a master degree in a relevant area,
such as computer science, mathematics, engineering  or linguistics. A
strong mathematical background, excellent programming skills (e.g.
C/C++, Java, MATLAB, and various scripting languages under Linux
environment), aptitude for creative research and autonomy are
expected. Experience in machine learning, Bayesian methods, and
natural language processing is a plus.

The Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics is a top-level
research group working in the area of computational linguistics and
natural language processing. During the fellowship, there will be good
opportunities to attend international conferences and workshops. The
formal applications should be submitted before June 1. Prospective
candidates are strongly encouraged to contact Dr Filip Jurcicek
(jurcicek@ufal.mff.cuni.cz) as soon as possible to obtain details
about the application process, the institute, and the research
opportunities.
Additional information is available here:
http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/~jurcicek/jobs.