TWO POST-DOCTORAL POSITIONS FOR THE PROJECT IFCASL (LORIA, NANCY, FRANCE)

We invite applications for a one-year Post?Doctoral position at the Laboratoire LORIA (Lorraine university, INRIA, CNRS, UMR 7306, France), to work on the project IFCASL (Individualised Feedback in computer-Assisted Spoken Language learning).

?    Description
The IFCASL project is funded by the Deutsche Forschunggemeinschaft (DFG) and the French National Research Agency (ANR). It aims at increasing the usability and efficiency of computer-assisted language learning software by adapting content, feedback and exercises to individual learners in the speech dimension of a foreign language. This will be achieved by integrating the production and perception of the learner?s own speech and focusing on the French-German language pair, in both directions.

The objective is to offer feedback that relies on phonetic knowledge incorporated in the learning system and interacts relevantly with automatic speech recognition (ASR) and signal processing. This means that confidence in the results returned by ASR will be taken into account to derive diagnoses and feedback: the higher the confidence the more explicit the level of feedback.

A corpus of German recorded by French learners and a second of French recorded by German learners will be exploited to determine errors on the one hand, and to develop algorithms involved in feedback on the other hand.

?    jobdescription
The post?doctoral fellow will be mainly involved in the development of the signal processing and automatic speech recognition algorithms intended to realize the diagnosis and acoustic feedback provided to learners. 

?    Qualifications
A Ph.D. in signal processing or in computer sciences (automatic speech recognition, statistic modeling) and solid competence/experience in JAVA development are required. Experience in phonetics and speaking German and French are also welcome.

?    Application procedure
Candidates should send a detailed CV with a list of publications, and a cover letter with statement of research interests and details of their experience in signal processing, automatic speech recognition and JAVA.
Please e-mail documents to: Yves.Laprie@loria.fr (Yves Laprie, LORIA, Nancy, France).

Deadline for submission: June 15, 2015
Expected start date: September 2015 (There is some flexibility.)
Length of contract: 12 months
Salary: ?2000/month (net)