Language technology education and research

in Saint-Petersburg

PhD education arrangements in General

In fact, in Russia there are two Doctoral degrees: Candidate of Sciences and Doctor of Sciences.
PhD studies (Candidate degree) in SPb consist of (1) the PhD dissertation which is a manuscript accompanied by a published summary and several refereed journal/conference articles, and of (2) some courses. The motivation of these courses is to facilitate the writing of the PhD thesis.

The students are expected to complete their PhD studies in 3 years (of full time work). Generally, they start working for PhD immediately upon graduation at the age of 21-22, or soon after it.

For Doctor of Sciences  degree the dissertation (it has the status of manuscript) should be an oral presention. A published monograph and a collection of refereed journal/conference articles plus a summary are necessary .
Attendants are expected to complete their studies in 3 years (of full time work).

PhD education in the Department of Phonetics of St-Petersburg State University (SPbSU):

There are 15 PhD students (seeking Candidate degree) at present, 6 of them are working in
language and speech technologies domain. We expect to have at least two students more
in autumn for LT studies.

The PhD students are enrolled on the basis of the enterance exams results.
The funding for PhD students comes from the Ministry of Education.

Each student has a primary supervisor.

Education for Master's ("specialist's") degree

Speech technology can be studied as the major subject at the Dept. of Phonetics of SPbSU only. Language technolody can be studied at the Dept. of Mathematical Linguistics of the same university.

At present Master's ("specialist's") level studies take 5 years.

Since our university adopts 2-level education (bachelor + master) starting from 2005, we are working
on the curricular and teaching programs similar to those of Euromaster in Language Technology,
that we hope will start in 2005-2006 academic year. This curricular will include Bachelor's level studies of 4 years followed by 2 years of Master's level.

Now the students of other departments and faculties of the SPbSU can study a 2 year program (additional/optional qualification) in "Speech Technology" at the Department of Phonetics.

Research in language technology

The research in the language and speech technology emerged in the 1950ies in Russia and was
established in the early 1960ies at various academic institutions. In the 60-ties the All-Russia
worshop in "Automatic recognition of sound patterns" was started and it existed untill 1990.
Thus the research teams from academic institutions and universities had a good opportunity to
discuss problems in the LT and ST domain every two years in addition to different
international and national conferences.

In 1996 a project funded by the national foundation "Integratia" was started. It aims at bringing together and integating efforts of leading research teams in Saint Petersburg which are envolved in research into the models of speech-to-speech translation (English-Russian and Russian-English). To this project joined the Dept. of Phonetics SPbSU (speech synthesis), the Laboratory of Engineering Linguistics of the Russian State Pedagogigal University (mashine translation) and the Laboratory of Speech of the St.-Petersburg Institute of Informatics of the Russian Academy of Sciences (speech recognition and understanding). In the framework of this project students from SPbSU and RSPU can freely take courses from the other participating university and from the Institute of Informatics.
The project has a fairy symbolic funding of about 1.500 EURO per team per year.

Some of the areas of research and experteese:

Department of Phonetics, Saint Petersburg State University.

- automatic text processing: parsing, automatic phonemic and phonetic transcriptions, intonation transcription;
- computer-assisted speech signal analysis and modification;
-speech signal segmentation (including automatic segmentation) into sounds, intonation units, phrases;
-automatic pitch tracking;
-acoustic databases, speech corpora, speech synthesis, speech recognition, computer-assisted language learning programs.

Dept. of Mathematical Linguistics, Saint Petersburg State University.
- language corpora;
- text processing.

Laboratory of Ingeneering Linguistics of the Russian State Pedagogigal University
- mashine translation;
- text processing.

Laboratory of Speech of the St.-Petersburg Institute of Informatics of the Russian Academy of Sciences
- automatic speech recognition;
- automatic speech understanding.

International projects the Department of Phonetics is envolved in:

INTAS project:
Dept. of Phonetics of Helsinki University (A.Iivonen, R.Aulanko, M.Lennes, H.Antilla),
Dept. of Foreign Languages of Jyvaskyla University (V. de Silva)
Institute of Phonetics of Amsterdam University (L.Pols, R. van Son)
Institute of Slavic and Balcan studies of Russian Academy of Sciences (T.Nikolaeva)

For more information: http://www.cc.jyu.fi/~silva/intas.html

NWO project:
Groningen University and Frysian Academy of Sciences (T. de Graaf, M.Bergmann)
For more information: http://odur.let.rug.nl/~degraaf/tundra_taiga.htm

Finnish Academy of Sciences: Dept. of Foreign Languages of Jyvaskyla University (V. de Silva)

NORFA network on "Variation in speech production and speech perception" (Norway, Greenland, Iceland, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Estonia).
For more information: http://www.hf.uio.no/ilf/forskning/norfa/index.html