29 January: FYI -- research assistant, corpus linguistics (Belgium)
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The Institute Language & Communication of the University of Louvain
(Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium) is looking for a research assistant to
support the technical and computational development and maintenance of
annotated spoken data. The candidate will be integrated into the
project entitled "Fluency and disfluency markers. A multimodal
contrastive perspective" and employed on a fixed-term contract of 12
to 18 months, depending on his/her qualification and experience.
Project description
The "Fluency and disfluency markers. A multimodal contrastive
perspective" project aims at studying (verbal) fluency through markers
of fluency and disfluency in spoken and sign language. Three
modalities are addressed: first language discourse (French, including
prosodic aspects / English), second language discourse (English) and
Belgian French Sign Language (LSFB). The central hypothesis of the
project poses that markers of fluency and disfluency are actually two
sides of the same coin. The project team members also investigate the
claim that the forms and functions of these markers vary
systematically across the languages, speakers and registers at
stake. The analyses are contrastive, multimodal and are based on
authentic data, using fully aligned (text-to-speech/sign) and
annotated corpora. Markers under investigation are prosodic, lexical,
syntactic and non-verbal.
More information on the project can be found here:
http://www.uclouvain.be/415256.html
The research teams involved in the project are:
• CECL – Centre for English Corpus Linguistics
(http://www.uclouvain.be/en-cecl.html);
• CENTAL – Centre de traitement automatique du langage (Centre for
Natural Language Processing,
http://www.uclouvain.be/en-cental.html);
• Valibel – Discours & Variation (Discourse & Variation,
http://www.uclouvain.be/valibel)
Job description
- Technical assistance for the annotation of corpora
(esp. interoperability between the various software
programs used in the project);
- Assistance for the extraction and analysis of annotated data;
- Development of a database containing annotations for different
languages (French, English), modalities (spoken
languages, sign languages) and proficiency levels
(native speakers and learners);
- Development of queries allowing for the comparison and analysis of
data (i.e. cross-linguistic, cross-modal, native vs
non-native).
The appointed researcher will work in close collaboration with the
project’s supervisors and PhD students). He/she will also take part in
scientific research leading to publications.
Eligibility requirements
- PhD or MA degree (with work experience) in linguistic
engineering/NLP
- Experience in sound/text alignment
- Good command of a scripting language (Perl/Python), which is
necessary for the cleaning and preparation of the
corpora
- Good command of the JAVA language
- Knowledge of the Praat software and EXMARaLDA software is an asset
(http://www.exmaralda.org/en)
- Experience in the development of databases for linguistic analysis
is a plus
- Good command of French and/or English
Length of the contract
12-18 months depending on the degree and professional experience of
the applicant (and on the number of working hours).
Beginning of the contract
From March 2016, or from July 2016 at the latest. The deadline for
application is March 1st 2016. Applications (motivation letter + CV +
recommendation letter) should be sent in electronic format to
Prof. Liesbeth Degand .
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