Within the context of the SignOn project funded by the European Horizon 2020 programme, the Centre for Computational Linguistics (CCL), part of the ComForT research unit at KU Leuven, seeks to hire a PhD student to carry out research on the subject of representation learning for sign language translation.
ProjectThe SignON project, which unites 17 European partners, aims to facilitate the exchange of information among deaf, hard of hearing, and hearing individuals across Europe by developing automatic sign language translation tools. Automatic sign language translation (the task of automatically translating a visual-gestural sign language utterance to an oral language utterance and vice versa) is an application that has the potential to reduce communicative barriers for millions of people. The World Health Organisation reports that there are about 466 million people in the world today with disabling hearing loss; and according to the World Federation of the Deaf over 70 million people communicate primarily via a sign language.
Sign languages are, just like verbal languages, highly structured systems governed by a set of linguistic rules. There are, however, also linguistic characteristics of signed languages that are modality specific. As a consequence, sign language translation cannot be considered as a one-to-one mapping from signs to spoken language words. Recent machine learning methods have greatly improved the state-of-the art in natural language processing applications, including the multi-modal problem of sign language translation. However, due to the inherent complexity of the task, most approaches do not favour an end-to-end approach (i.e., directly translating sign to text), but first transform the signs to an intermediate, gloss-based transcription (sign to gloss), and in a second step translate the intermediate representation to verbal language (gloss to text). Using glosses as an interface for sign to language translation is fairly successful, but also poses a number of problems. Gloss annotations are an imprecise representation of sign language; in this respect, they are often an impoverished representation that does not do justice to the complex multi-channel production of sign language.
The PhD candidate will focus on the intermediate representation that functions as an interface between sign language and verbal language in the context of sign language translation. Research will be carried out along two tracks:
Profile
Offer
Interested?To apply, please send a motivation letter, a CV and the contact details of two references with your application. For more information please contact Tim Van de Cruys, mail: tim.vandecruys@kuleuven.be.
You can apply for this job no later than February 04, 2021 via the
KU Leuven seeks to foster an environment where all talents can flourish, regardless of gender, age, cultural background, nationality or impairments. If you have any questions relating to accessibility or support, please contact us at diversiteit.HR@kuleuven.be.
|