Cambridge University Engineering Department (CUED) is able to offer, subject to confirmation of funding, a number of well-funded three year PhD research studentships associated with a new grant from the DARPA Global Autonomous Language Exploitation (GALE) program. The aim of the GALE program is to develop and apply speech and language processing technologies to recognise, analyze and translate large volumes of speech and text in multiple languages. A wide range of PhD topics under this project are possible. These include: improving the word error rate of conventional speech recognition systems; extracting additional acoustic and linguistic metadata from acoustic data to aid recognition and translation; improving statistical machine translation; integration of speech recognition and machine translation. The PhD work will build on the existing state-of-the-art large vocabulary recognition systems and statistical machine translation systems developed at Cambridge. For further details see the AGILE web-page.

These studentships give an opportunity for study towards a PhD while working in a research group which has a world-leading reputation in speech and machine translation research. There are excellent opportunities for publications, travel and conference visits. The group has outstanding research facilities.

Candidates must have a very good first degree in a relevant discipline and a relevant Masters degree is an advantage. Since the project will use and extend the HTK large vocabulary speech recognition system and the translation template model toolkit, familiarity with the HTK toolkit and a good knowledge of C is a distinct advantage.

The research studentship positions are available from October 2005. The studentships will cover fees and a maintenance allowance in excess of current EPSRC awards from the UK Government. For non-EU candidates, the studentships will also cover all overseas fees.

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 15th September 2005.

Reference:http://mi.eng.cam.ac.uk/~mjfg/Gale_Phd.html