Research Opportunities

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Revision as of 12:13, 13 September 2010

Research Exchange

This page serves as a research exchange for faculty and graduate students in linguistics who are seeking research assistance and undergraduates who are looking for opportunities to take part in research.

Posts concerning research assistance should include:

• Title of the project
• Specific tasks/duties you would like done
• Any specific skills or abilities that are required
• Time commitment expected (ex. 3 hours per week, a total of 40 hours over the course of the summer, up to 20 hours total, etc.)
• Start date
• Compensation information (Uncompensated, experience only? UROP? Course credit? Work-study? Hourly rate?)
• Contact information
• Status of the project as "open" or "closed"

Once the project is finished or you have enough help, please mark the position as closed or delete the posting.

Open Research Positions

Semantics & Baseball (OPEN, Prof. Ezra Keshet): Looking for students to help transcribe radio broadcasts of baseball games in order to examine how this language encodes the action going on in the game. Time commitment can vary from 1 game (4-5 hours' work) up to as many games as you want, starting in early May. Work is uncompensated, but credit opportunities are possible. Email me at ekeshet@umich.edu if you are interested.

Database of Phonetic Symbols (OPEN, Terry Szymanski): I'm looking for volunteers to enter data into an electronic database of phonetic symbols in current or past use by linguists. This database will have applications in language-processing software and could help improve optical character recognition of scanned linguistic texts. Work as much or as little as you like. No compensation: email tdszyman@umich.edu

Acquisition of Phonological Variation (OPEN, Andries Coetzee): I'm looking for a student to help me: (i) to compile a bibliography on the acquisition of variable phonological processes, (ii) to summarize important findings about this topic. I have some journal articles with which we can start. The student will read these articles, and summarize the most important findings of the research. The student will then follow-up on the the references cited in the articles in order to compile a comprehensive bibliography on the topic. Some experience with phonology/phonetics required -- at least Ling 111, preferably more. Work as much or as little as you like, but at least a few hours a week is minimally necessary. Compensation will be $10 per hour for up to 50 hours of work, or course credit is also an option. Email me at coetzee@umich.edu.

Discourse Prosody (OPEN, Joseph Tyler): Looking for a volunteer to help measure prosodic features (e.g. amplitude, speech rate) in spoken recordings. You would be working with Praat and a Praat script I have written to automatically collect new prosodic measures to correlate with the discourse structure of a news article. The goal of the project is to see what prosodic measures speakers use that indicate the large-scale structure of spoken language. Experience with Praat preferred. Time commitment is flexible, although initial tasks may take 5 hours. No compensation. Email me at jctyler@umich.edu if you are interested.

Voicing in German - a corpus study (OPEN, Andries Coetzee): I am currently in the planning stages of a project on the distribution of the phonological [+voice] in German. German is an example of a language that has the process "final devoicing" - i.e. voiced obstruents become voiceless in word-final position ('Rad': /Rad/ -> [Rat]). I plan to investigate exactly how this pattern is represented in the German lexicon. We will work through a large textual corpus of German to extract relevant examples, and then do statistical analysis of the results. To participate: (i) You must preferably have at least a basic knowledge of German. (ii) You must preferably have completed at least Ling 313. (iii) If you have experience in using in Excel, it would be helpful. All of these are strong recommendations, but not absolute requirements. Talk to me is you are interested but do not meet these requirements. Work as much or as little as you like, but at least a few hours a week is minimally necessary. Compensation will be $10 per hour for up to 50 hours of work, or course credit is also an option. Email me at coetzee@umich.edu.

social bias and speech perception (OPEN, Kevin McGowan): I need help setting up and testing perception experiments. I'll teach you how eye-tracking works and what goes into designing a word identification experiment (using linger, generating signal-dependent noise in matlab, recording stimuli, using Praat, etc.). Apart from knowledge & experience I probably can't compensate you for your time (though I'm working on it). I just need a second pair of hands and ears for set up and testing before I run experiments on subjects. Email me at clunis@umich.edu if you are interested.

Multi-Lingual Grammar Annotation (OPEN, Terry Szymanski): I am assembling a corpus of electronic texts of language description materials (i.e. grammars and lexicons) for as many languages as possible. I am looking for volunteer (unpaid, non-credit) help in building this corpus. Duties include:

• Search the internet to find relevant electronic texts and add them to the corpus
• Annotate texts using the GATE annotation software. Annotation includes labeling foreign words in the text and identifying glosses of these words within the text.
• Work on any language or language family that interests you
• Get experience using NLP tools (GATE: the General Architecture for Text Engineering) and concepts in language documentation, language engineering, information extraction

Contact Terry Szymanski tdszyman@umich.edu if you are interested.