Postdoc proposal

Spontaneous Speech Recognition.

Application to Situated Corpora in French.

September 4, 2019

1 Postdoc Subject

The goal of the project is to advance the state-of-the-art in spontaneous auto-

matic speech recognition (ASR). Recent advances in ASR show excellent per-

formances on tasks such as read speech ASR (Librispeech), TV shows (MGB

challenge), but what about spontaneous communicative speech ?

This postdoc project would leverage existing transcribed corpora in French

(more than 300 hours) recorded in everyday communication (speech recordings

inside a family, in a shop, during an interview, etc.). One impact of the project

would be the automatization of transcription on very challenging data in order

to feed linguistic and phonetic studies at scale.

Research topics:

 End-to-end ASR models

 Spontaneous speech ASR

 Colloquial speech transcription

 Data augmentation for spontaneous and colloquial language modelling

 Transcribing situated corpora

2 Requirements

We are looking for an outstanding and highly motivated postdoc candidate to

work on this subject. Following requirements are mandatory:

 PhD degree in natural language processing or speech processing.

 Excellent programming skills (mostly in Python and deep learning frame-

works).

1

 Interest in pluri-disciplinary research (speech technology and speech sci-

ence)

 Good oral and written communication in English (French is a plus while

not mandatory)

 Ability to work autonomously and in collaboration with other team mem-

bers.

3 Work context

Grenoble Alpes Univ. o
ers an excellent research environment with ample com-

puting facilities, as well as remarkable surroundings to explore over the week-

ends. The postdoc project will be funded by the Grenoble Articial Intelligence

Institute (MIAI). The candidate will work both at LIG-lab (GETALP team)

and LIDILEM-lab. The duration of the postdoc is 18 months.

4 How to apply?

Applications should include a detailed CV; a copy of the last diploma; at least

two references (people likely to be contacted); a cover letter of one page; a

one-page summary of the PhD thesis. Applications should be sent to lau-

rent.besacier@imag.fr Applications will be evaluated as they are received: the

position is open until it is lled.