A number of positions are available, subject to confirmation of funding, for Research Associates and for exceptionally well-qualified candidates for Senior Research Associates to work on a project funded by the DARPA Global Autonomous Language Exploitation (GALE) program. The aim of GALE is to develop and apply speech and language processing technologies to recognise, analyse and translate large volumes of speech and text in multiple languages. A wide range of research areas will be pursued including: improving the word error rate of conventional speech recognition systems; extracting additional acoustic and linguistic meta-data from acoustic data to aid recognition and translation; improving statistical machine translation; integration of speech recognition and machine translation. The work will use, and extend, the existing state-of-the-art large vocabulary recognition systems and statistical machine translation systems developed at Cambridge University. For further details see http://mi.eng.cam.ac.uk/research/projects/AGILE/index.html.

This is an opportunity to work in a research group which has a world-leading reputation in speech recognition and statistical machine translation research. There are excellent opportunities for publications, travel and conference visits. The group has outstanding research facilities. For suitably qualified candidates there may also be the chance to contribute to the MPhil in Computer Speech, Text and Internet Technology (http://mi.eng.cam.ac.uk/cstit.html).

Candidates must have a very good first degree in a relevant discipline and preferably have a higher degree. Since the project will use and extend the HTK toolkit (http://htk.eng.cam.ac.uk)and the translation template model system, a good knowledge of C or C++ is required. In addition, experience in one or more of the following technical areas is a distinct advantage:

• speech recognition with the HTK toolkit;
• large vocabulary speech recognition;
• language modelling;
• machine translation;
• weighted finite state machines;
• machine learning and statistical pattern processing techniques.

As two of the target languages are Arabic and Mandarin, fluency in either of these languages would be an advantage.

The project is expected to start in October 2005 and has a five year duration, depending on satisfactory milestone completion. Appointments will be made for up to two years in the first instance. Salary is currently in the range from £19,460 to £29,127 for Research Associates and £24,820 to £35,883 for Senior Research Associates (pay award pending).

Further details and an application form may be obtained from Debora Cane, Department of Engineering, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, CB2 1PZ, (Tel +44 01223 332711, Fax +44 01223 332662, email dc252@eng.cam.ac.uk), to whom a letter of application and a CV should be sent so as to reach her not later than 8th September 2005.

Reference:http://mi.eng.cam.ac.uk/jobs/