Open Topics for BA/MA Theses & Programming Projects

Text Technologies

Computer-Assisted Language Learning (contact: Prof Gerold Schneider)

(Cognitive) Corpus Linguistics/Digital Humanities

Sign Language Processing (contact: Dr Mathias Müller)

Normalization/Morphology

Misc

Machine Translation (contact: Prof Rico Sennrich)

  • Measure effect of machine translation quality on downstream performance
  • Automatic error analysis for speech translation
  • Reproduce (and find limits of) recent publications
  • Unsupervised Translation Direction Detection (contact: Jannis Vamvas)

Sentiment Analysis (SA) (contact: Dr Manfred Klenner)

  • Sentiment Inference as Textual Entailment 
  • Sentiment Inference: Identify micro stance
  • SA for speech synthesis of direct speech
  • SA in literary texts
  • Extracting predicate argument structures from complex NPs
  • Other topics from SA are possible as well

Speech and Machine Learning (contact : Tanja Samardzić)

 

Phonetics & Speech Sciences

Second Language Acquisition (contact: Prof Volker Dellwo)

There are no open thesis projects at the moment. However, do not hesitate to contact Prof Dellwo or other staff members from the Phonetics & Speech Sciences Group if you are interested in this topic.

Aging and Speech Pathology (contact: Prof Volker Dellwo)

  • Temporal processing in aging
  • The effect of aging on speech production (contact: Dr Elisa Pellegrino)

Sociophonetics and Dialectology (contact: Prof Stephan Schmid)

Speech Signal Processing (contact: Prof Volker Dellwo)

  • Natural deceptive speech phonological analysis (contact: Alessandro De Luca)
  • Use of intonation for voice recognition in tone and non-tone languages
  • Gender classification between different populations
  • The effect of nicotine craving on speech (perception and production)
  • Gender detection before puberty (by adults and same age group)
  • Automatic prominence detection in English L2 (contact: Dr Sandra Schwab; co-supervision with Jean-Philippe Goldman, University of Geneva)
  • Automatic segmentation of child speech in noisy environment" (contact: Dr Sandra Schwab; co-supervision with Nathalie Dherbey Chapuis, University of Fribourg)
  • Combining speech recognition system and automatic prominence detection for Computer-Assisted Language Learning (contact: Dr Sandra Schwab)
  • The effect of voice conversion technique on speakers' identity (contact: Dr Elisa Pellegrino)
  • The effect of group size on phonetic convergence and speaker individuality (contact: Dr Elisa Pellegrino)

Speech Production (contact: Dr Daniel Friedrichs)

  • Assessing the relationship between anatomy and speech movements

Neural Processing of Speech (contact: Dr Daniel Friedrichs)

  • Evaluating mobile fNIRS as a neuroimaging technique in speech & hearing science

 

Digital Linguistics

Experimental Psycholinguistics (contact: Prof. Dr. Lena A. Jäger)

  • The impact of cognitive states on sentence processing
  • Methodological comparison between eye-tracking and self-paced reading for psycholinguistic research
  • Investigating the implications of the animacy hierarchy in German

Computational psycholinguistics / Computational Cognitive Science (contact: Prof. Dr. Lena A. Jäger)

  • Comparing human and machine surprisal
  • Inferring subjective vs objective text difficulty from eye movements in reading

Cognitively Enhanced / Interpretablee NLP (contact: Prof. Dr. Lena A. Jäger)

  • Predicting text comprehension from eye movements in reading
  • Detection of mental and physical fatigue from eye movements in reading
  • Detection of alcoholization from eye movements in reading
  • Personality classification from eye movements in reading
  • Predicting programming skills from eye movements in code reading
  • Deep neural feature representation of eye-tracking data
  • Predicting foreign language proficiency from eye movements in reading

 

Computational Neuroscience of Speech & Hearing

*** Prof Nathalie Giroud is currently on maternity leave (HS 2022). ***

Further contact persons for specific areas