Computer-Assisted Language Learning

• The Automatic Detection of Learner Errors and Difficulties

 

(Cognitive) Corpus Linguistics/Digital Humanities

• Data-driven Features of Linguistic Variation
• News from the Past
• Correlations between reading speed and cognitive measures
• Automatic Classification of Large Document Collections
• Quantifying views about the future during the latest Digital Revolution (1998-2020)
• Text Reuse Detection (BA Thesis)

 

Sign Language Processing

• Master thesis: language modeling with pose estimation data for sign language processing
• Programming project: improve open-source libraries for sign language processing

 

Normalization/Morphology

• Using neural networks for spelling normalisation
• Multilingual morphological analysis

 

Misc

• Automatic Classification of Large Text Collections
• Retrieve-and-edit seq2seq modelling for review response generation

 

Machine Translation (contact: Prof Rico Sennrich)

• Measure effect of machine translation quality on downstream performance
• Automatic error analysis for speech translation
• Better text representations for non-concatenative morphology
•  

 

Sentiment Analysis (SA): 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

• Swiss German Speech-to-Text
• Spoken language chunking for Swiss German

 

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)

• Variants of /r/ in the Cantons of Basel-City and Basel-Country: a sociophonetic survey
• VoiceOffsetTime as a cue to the fortis-lenis distinction in Swiss German: acoustic and laryngographic evidence

 

Speech Signal Processing (contact: Prof Volker Dellwo)

• 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 segmentation of child speech in noisy environment" (contact: Dr Sandra Schwab; in collaboration with Nathalie Dherbey Chapuis, UNIFR)
• 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

• Assessing the relationship between anatomy and speech movements (contact: Dr Daniel Friedrichs)

 

Neural Processing of Speech

• Evaluating mobile fNIRS as a neuroimaging technique in speech & hearing science (contact: Dr Daniel Friedrichs)

 

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

 

• Language Technology for Heritage Texts (Martin Volk)
• Machine Translation (Martin Volk, Rico Sennrich, Annette Rios, Mathias Müller)
• Toponym Recognition (Martin Volk)
• Speech (Volker Dellwo)
• Machine Learning (Simon Clematide)
• Large News Corpora (Simon Clematide)
• Digital Humanities (Gerold Schneider, Simon Clematide)
• Morphology (Simon Clematide, Tanja Samardžić)
• Corpus Linguistics (Gerold Schneider, Tanja Samardžić)
• CALL (Computer-assisted Language Learning) (Gerold Schneider, Manfred Klenner)
• Automatic Processing of Sign Language (Sarah Ebling, Annette Rios, Mathias Müller)
• Language Technology for Accessibility (Sarah Ebling)
• Processing of Swiss German (Tanja Samardžić)
• Coreference Resolution (Manfred Klenner)
• Argumentation Mining (Manfred Klenner)
• Sentiment Analysis (SA) (Manfred Klenner)
• Experimental psycholinguistics (Lena A. Jäger)
• Computational psycholinguistics /  Computational cognitive science (Lena A. Jäger)
• Cognitively enhanced/interpretable NLP (Lena A. Jäger)