POST-DOC OPENING
IN SPEECH INTELLIGIBILITY AT IRIT-TOULOUSE, FRANCE

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Title: Postdoctoral position in speech intelligibility

Application deadline: 1/31/2016

Description: The decreasing mortality of Head and Neck Cancers highlights the importance to reduce the impact on Quality of Life (QoL). But, the usual tools for assessing QoL are not relevant for measuring the impact of the treatment on the main functions involved by the sequelae. Validated tools for measuring the functional outcomes of carcinologic treatment are missing, in particular for speech disorders. Some assessments are available for voice disorders in laryngeal cancer but there are based on very poor tools for oral and pharyngeal cancers involving more the articulation of speech than voice.

In this context, the C2SI (Carcinologic Speech Severity Index) project proposes to develop a severity index of speech disorders describing the outcomes of therapeutic protocols completing the survival rates. There is a strong collaboration between linguists, phoneticians, speech therapists and computer science researchers, in particular those from the Toulouse Institute of Computer Science Research (IRIT), within the SAMoVA team (http://www.irit.fr/recherches/SAMOVA/).

Intelligibility of speech is the usual way to quantify the severity of neurologic speech disorders. But this measure is not valid in clinical practice because of several difficulties as the familiarity effect of this kind of speech and the poor inter-judge reproducibility. Moreover, the transcription intelligibility scores do not accurately reflect listener comprehension. Therefore, our hypothesis is that an automatic assessment technic can measure the impact of the speech disorders on the communication abilities giving a severity index of speech in patients treated for head and neck and particularly for oral and pharyngeal cancer.

The main objective is then to demonstrate that the C2SI, obtained by an automatic speech processing tool, produces equivalent or superior outcomes than a score of speech intelligibility obtained by human listeners, in terms of QoL foreseeing the speech handicap, after the treatment of oral and/or pharyngeal cancer. 

The database is actually recorded at the Institut Universitaire du Cancer in Toulouse with CVC pseudo-words, readings, short sentences focusing on prosody and spontaneous descriptions of pictures. 

Roadmap to develop an automatic system that will evaluate the intelligibility of impaired speech:

- Study existing SAMoVA technologies and evaluate them with the C2SI protocol,

- Find relevant features with the audio signal that support intelligibility,

- Merge those features to obtain the C2SI,

- Correlate it with the speech intelligibility scores obtained by human listeners,

- Study in which way the features support understandability as well.

Skills:

For this project, we are looking for one candidate with a PhD degree in the areas of machine learning, signal processing, and also with: programming skills, scientific rigour, creativity, good publication record, excellent communication skills, enjoying teamwork...

Salary and other conditions of employments will follow CNRS (French National Center for Scientific Research) standard rules for non-permanent researchers, according to the experience of the candidate.

Location: the work will be conducted in the SAMoVA team of the IRIT, Toulouse (France).

Contact: Jérôme Farinas jerome.farinas@irit.fr , Julie Mauclair julie.mauclair@irit.fr

Duration: 12 to 24 months

Candidates should email a letter of application, a detailed CV including a complete list of publications, and source code showcasing programming skills if available.