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********************************************************* foNETiks A newsletter for The International Phonetic Association and for the Phonetic Sciences November 2017 ********************************************************* Linda Shockey, University of Reading, UK Rachel Smith, University of Glasgow, UK Radek Święciński, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences Claire Timmins, University of Strathclyde, UK Duncan Robertson, University of York, UK E-mail address: fonetiks-request AT jiscmail.ac.uk The foNETiks archive can be found on the WWW at: http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/lists/fonetiks.html Twitter: @foNETiks_list Visit the IPA web page at http://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org<http://www.internationalphoneticassociation.org/> ****************************************************** ANNOUNCEMENTS [new ones marked ##, normally with further information below] [date of first appearance follows] ****************************************************** foNETiks is now on Twitter! Follow us @foNETiks_list ****************************************************** The Association is pleased to announce that Illustrations of the IPA from 2001 through 2014 are now freely available from the Journal of the IPA website: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-the-international-phonetic-association Click on "Illustrations of the IPA - free content" to see a list, or access individual Illustrations from contents of back issues. (05/17) ****************************************************** 11-12 January 2018. 10th Speech in Noise Workshop. Glasgow, UK. https://spin2018.eu/?p=0 (10/17) 12-14 January 2018. 15th Old World Conference on Phonology, University College London (UCL) http://www.ucl.ac.uk/~ucjtcwh/OCP15/OCP15.html (08/17) 25-27 January 2018. Speech in the Natural Context - XIV Convegno Nazionale AISV, Bolzano-Bozen, Italy. https://aisv2018.events.unibz.it/ (08/17) 7-9 March 2018. Variable Perception and Production Correlates for Word Stress in First Language Acquisition and Child Second Language Learning. Stuttgart, Germany. http://ling.uni-konstanz.de/pages/home/ag14_dgfs2018/ (07/17) 27-28 March 2018. 8th Northern Englishes Workshop (NEW8), Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. https://blogs.ncl.ac.uk/northernenglishes8/ (09/17) 30-31 March 2018. 4th Belgrade International Meeting of English Phoneticians (BIMEP 2018), Belgrade. http://linguistlist.org/easyabs/BIMEP2018 (09/17) 5 April 2018. ALOES 2018: Pre-Conference Workshop on Voice Quality. Paris, France. http://www.clillac-arp.univ-paris-diderot.fr/user/nicolas_ballier/voice_2018 (10/17) 6-7 April 2018. 19th Conference on Spoken English at Villetaneuse (ALOES 2018). Paris, France. pierre.fournier AT univ-paris13.fr (10/17) 12-14 April 2018. BAAP Colloquium. Canterbury, United Kingdom. https://blogs.kent.ac.uk/baap/ (07/17) 13-16 June 2018. Speech Prosody 2018. Poznań, Poland. http://sp9.home.amu.edu.pl/index.php (07/17) 18-20 June 2018. 6th International Symposium on Tonal Aspects of Languages. Berlin, Germany. http://public.beuth-hochschule.de/~mixdorff/tal2018/ (10/17) 19-22 June 2018. LabPhon 16, University of Lisboa, Portugal. http://labphon16.labphon.org/ (8/17) 2-6 July 2018. Spoken Corpora advances: prosody as the crux of speech segmentation, annotation and multilevel linguistic studies. Cape Town, South Africa. http://icl20capetown.com/images/WorkshopSummaries/31.-Spoken-Corpora-advances.pdf (07/17) 11-13 October 2018. International Conference on Tone and Intonation. Gothenburg, Sweden. http://sprak.gu.se/forskning/konferenser/tone-and-intonation (10/17) 4-10 August 2019. XIXth International Congress of Phonetic Sciences. Melbourne, Australia. http://icphs2019.org/ (03/16) ***************** CONFERENCES ***************** There have been no new notices this month. ********************** POSITIONS VACANT *********************** Assistant Professor in Speech/Phonetics and Cognitive Systems, The University of British Columbia, Vancouver The Department of Linguistics at the University of British Columbia, invites applications for a tenure-track Assistant Professor position in Speech/Phonetics and Cognitive Systems to begin July 1, 2018. Candidates should have a research program in speech or phonetics, drawing on Linguistics as well as Computer Science, Psychology, and/or Philosophy, applying computational or experimental methods to questions about speech, language, and the mind. Candidates must have a Ph.D. in Linguistics or a closely related field and are expected to demonstrate a record of high-quality research and a record of or potential for excellence in teaching at the graduate and undergraduate levels. The successful candidate will be expected to maintain an active program of research, graduate supervision, service, and teaching at all levels. They will be expected to contribute to teaching in the Cognitive Systems program, a multi-disciplinary undergraduate program (http://cogsys.ubc.ca<http://cogsys.ubc.ca/>), in addition to the Speech Sciences Major (http://linguistics.ubc.ca/undergrad/prospective-students/speech-sciences-program-descriptions) and the Linguistics Major (http://linguistics.ubc.ca/undergrad/prospective-students/linguistics-program-description) housed within the Department. The Department covers a broad range of subfields in linguistics, and approaches these from a variety of perspectives, with particular strengths in formal-theoretical linguistics, experimental and field linguistics, language acquisition, and computational approaches to the study of communicative behaviour; the Department is a centre for the study of the indigenous languages of the Americas with a particular focus on the First Nations languages of western Canada, and has a long history of work on African languages. See the Department website for further details. Candidates that can bridge areas and make links with other units on campus are especially welcome. Applicants should apply by Dec. 8, 2017 through the UBC Faculty careers website below and must be prepared to upload in the order listed: letter of application, curriculum vitae, research and teaching statements, two samples of published or unpublished scholarship, up to two additional supporting documents (up to 3MB per document), and evidence of teaching effectiveness if available. Review of applications will begin soon after Dec. 8 and will continue until the position is filled. In addition, applicants should arrange for three confidential signed letters of recommendation to be sent separately by the same date via email to: vicki.ferguson[https://linguistlist.org/images/address-marker.gif]ubc.ca with the subject "Speech/Phonetics and Cognitive Systems Search"). Enquiries addressed to Dr. Molly Babel, Chair of the Search Committee, c/o Vicki Ferguson. This position is subject to final budgetary approval. Salary will be commensurate with qualifications and experience. Equity and diversity are essential to academic excellence. An open and diverse community fosters the inclusion of voices that have been underrepresented or discouraged. We encourage applications from members of groups that have been marginalized on any grounds enumerated under the B.C. Human Rights Code, including sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, racialization, disability, political belief, religion, marital or family status, age, and/or status as a First Nation, Métis, Inuit, or Indigenous person. All qualified candidates are encouraged to apply; however, Canadians and permanent residents will be given priority. Application Deadline: 08-Dec-2017 Web Address for Applications: http://www.hr.ubc.ca/careers/faculty-careers/28089 <http://www.hr.ubc.ca/careers/faculty-careers/28089> Contact Information: Dr. Molly Babel Email: vicki.ferguson AT ubc.ca _________________________________________ Voice Developer (German TTS), Nuance Communications, Merlebeke, Belgium or Turin, Italy As a Voice Builder you will support our voice builder team in the development of German TTS voices, mainly supporting on speech data validation. The role can be filled in Merelbeke, Belgium or Turin, Italy. Responsibilities: - Perform text selection for recordings with female German TTS voice; proofreading, correction and modification of selected text in German - Perform phonetic validation of speech data i.e. listen to voice recordings and check if orthography, phonetic transcriptions and prosodic labels are correct and match the audio signals. - Perform segmentation validation i.e. check if phoneme boundaries are well aligned to the audio signal. - Perform synthesis evaluation i.e. listen and evaluate synthesis generated with Female/Male German text-to-speech voices. - Paticipate in the effort of tuning the TTS voices. - Testing the product release. Qualifications: - 1-2 years work experience, promising graduates are encouraged to apply! - Native proficiency in German - Good level of English - Thorough understanding of phonological and phonetic concepts - Very good listening skills - Strong computer skills in a Windows environment and greater than average comfort with software - Strong sense of precision and quality in the daily job - Ability to work independently as well as in a team - Good problem solving, analytic and troubleshooting skills Preferred Skills: - Experience with correcting phonetic transcriptions for speech technology - Familiarity with development of language assets of text-to-speech technologies - Familiarity with machine learning techniques Education: - Candidates need to have studied German at an advanced (university) level (eg germanists, translater, interpreter) - MSc degree in phonetics, computational linguistics or other relevant field Application Deadline: 31-Jan-2018 (Open until filled) Email Address for Applications: lea.mencner AT nuance.com Contact Information: Lea Mencner Email: lea.mencner AT nuance.com _________________________________________ Language Engineer (French), Amazon, Cambridge UK Come join us, we build TTS voices that help developers revolutionize the way people interact with devices and services! At Amazon, we take pride in building complete end-to-end solutions, starting from researching a problem, implementing the solution, building a scalable and reliable service and ensuring the service is there when you need it. The position is based at the Amazon office in Cambridge, UK or Gdansk, Poland. As a TTS Language Engineer you will work alongside Software Developers who are subject matter experts in speech synthesis and related fields. You are expected to have solid knowledge of linguistics, in particular knowledge of phonetics/phonology. You will be working on a variety of tasks to improve natural language processing of TTS (text-to-speech). You will actively collaborate with Software Developers with linguistic expertise throughout the whole language and voice building process at Amazon. The tasks include: - Normalizing textual resources through regular expressions - Creating natural language test cases for natural language processing modules - Labeling text with semantic, syntactic and morphological features - Contribute to the formalization of language models through in depth knowledge of phonological and morphosyntactic aspects of the target language - Annotating lexicon entries according to guidelines - Producing / validating phonetic transcriptions - QA of TTS voices and linguistic data Basic Qualifications: - Solid knowledge of phonetics/phonology - Native-level proficiency in French - Solid knowledge of regular expressions - Ability to create / fix phonetic transcriptions in French - Knowledge of Unix/Linux command line tools - Knowledge of scripting languages (e.g. Perl, Python) Preferred Qualifications: - Degree in Linguistics, with specialization in Phonology, Computational linguistics or similar - Familiarity with software version control tools (e.g. Git) - Solid communication skills - Strong personal interest in learning, researching, and creating new technologies related to foreign languages, linguistics, phonetics, phonology and language technology - Comfortable working in a fast paced, highly collaborative, dynamic work environment Application Deadline: (Open until filled) Email Address for Applications: Langton AT amazon.co.uk Web Address for Applications: https://www.amazon.jobs/en/jobs/577422/tts-language-engineer-french <https://www.amazon.jobs/en/jobs/577422/tts-language-engineer-french> Contact Information: Paweł Mazur Email: pawmazur AT amazon.com ********************** INVITATION FOR EXPRESSIONS OF INTEREST *********************** The Voice and Identity - Source, Filter, Biometric project have one, or possibly 2, post-doctoral RA positions which will become available in the research team from 1st January 2018. Appointments will be for an initial period of 9 months, but we hope that this will be extended for a further 3 months. Potential appointees should hold (or be close to submitting) a PhD in phonetics or related fields relevant to the scope of the project. In the first instance, we invite potential candidates to submit a CV and a brief statement of interest outlining relevant experience and skills (contact details below). Project Team The project team is led by Professor Paul Foulkes and Professor Peter French, with Dr Philip Harrison as Research Fellow and Dr Vincent Hughes as consultant. Aims The project has two aims: 1. To develop a model of individual speaker characterisation incorporating the three elements of the speech/voice 'triangle' - namely the relationships between (a) the biological bases of speech/voice production, (b) the auditory perceptions generated by different organic dimensions, configurations and movements, and (c) the associated measurable acoustic correlates. As well as contributing to the subject knowledge of speech science generally, the development of this model will enable us to form a causal understanding of the strengths and limitations of the speaker comparison methods tested empirically under 2. 2. To compare the performance of different methods for forensic speaker comparison - from linguistics and phonetics, acoustics, and automatic speaker recognition (ASR) - on the same set of recordings. We will explore the performance of the methods to assess their relative strengths, the consistency of their results and error patterns, and thus the potential for different methods to be integrated into a single framework. The ultimate goal is to improve methods in forensic voice comparison, taking a major step towards the development of a methodology that is more transparent, validated, and replicable. This outcome will benefit academics and forensic practitioners, the public, judicial systems, and investigative/security agencies. Summary of the purpose of the posts The role of the RAs is to assist with data analysis, and the preparation of conference presentations and publications. Empirical work will consist of a range of analysis types, including ASR and acoustic phonetic analysis using programs such as Praat. Knowledge of relevant areas of human anatomy/physiology (vocal tract and larynx) would be particularly welcome. The specific tasks to be undertaken by the appointees will be negotiated within the team. For further information and enquiries, please contact: Professor Paul Foulkes (paul.foulkes AT york.ac.uk<mailto:[log in to unmask]>; + 44 (0)1904 322669<tel:01904%20322669>) or Professor Peter French (peter.french AT york.ac.uk<mailto:[log in to unmask]>; +44 (0)1904 634821<tel:01904%20634821>). ******************************************************************** The deadline for material for the next foNETiks newsletter is 7th December 2017. ********************************************************************