Research Apprenticeships

The goal of a research apprenticeship is to convey practical experience in the focal research topics of our institute and to lead students through individual guidance to independent research. Students are expected to work independently and to be self-motivated. Mentors will offer guidance, feedback and advice in regular meetings or other appropriate form.

Below is a list of possible topics offered by various members of our institute. Interested students should contact potential mentors for further information.

title	Information and Language
areas	Language, Variation & Change, Language Structure
contact	Christian Bentz
	Human language is an information encoding device. This apprenticeship aims to familiarize students with the theory of information and how it relates to research in linguistics. The RA offers several topics: 1) language variation: information-theoretic accounts of linguistic diversity, 2) language change: the evolution of information-encoding in human languages, 3) language structure: investigating the difference between language and other communication systems. Depending on preferences and skills, these topics can entail detailed literature reviews, (small scale) corpus building, basic statistical analyses and visualizations with R.

title	Articulatory Speech Production with PAULE and the VocalTractLab
areas	Language Processing, Language Structure and Language, Variation and Change
contact	Konstantin Sering
	Synthesizing speech with an articulatory speech synthesizer and compare it to human articulatory data like EMA data or ultrasound recordings of the midsagital tongue plane gives insights in how humans use their speech system to utter words. The articulatory speech synthesizer VocalTractLab models the tongue and jaw movement and the airflow through the oral and nasal cavity. Students are will learn how to develop a research questions, simulate data with the articulatory speech synthesizer, and how to compare the simulated data to recordings of human data.

title	Phonetics, Morphology and the Cognitive Aspects thereof
areas	Language Processing, Language Structure and Language, Variation and Change
contact	Harald Baayen
	For possible topics or research fields please consult the webpage of the group Quantitative Linguistics.

title	Historical Linguistics and Language Evolution
areas	Language, Variation & Change, Language Structure
contact	Gerhard Jäger
	For possible topics or research fields please contact Prof. Dr. Gerhard Jäger.

title	Universal Dependencies and computational tools
areas	Language Structure, and Language, Variation and Change
contact	Fabricío Gerardi Keplerstr. 2, Raum 284, phone number: 07071 2977315
	Universal Dependencies (UD) departs from the idea that syntactic structure consists primarily of binary asymmetrical relations. This theory is a good basis for crosslinguistically consistent annotation of typologically diverse languages in a way that supports computational natural language understanding and allows for research in typology, morphology, syntax, and language structure in general. The research apprenticeship may focuses on literature review, maintaining and improving the quality of UD treebanks from the simplest work with data to the development of computational tools.

title	Cognitive and computational models of language use
areas	Language Processing
contact	Michael Franke
	Contact Prof. Franke for information on current research topics. A research apprenticeship requires at least one of the following formal requirements: (i) advanced programming skills (Python, R or similar), (ii) familiarity with experimental methods, or (iii) solid practical knowledge of statistics. Ideally, you bring experience with neural network modeling (PyTorch, Tensorflow or similar), probabilistic programming (Stan, PyMC, WebPPL or similar), experience with Bayesian data analysis (in R), or familiarity with Javascript (for online experiments).