Intern, Linguistics

Overview

SRI’s Information & Computing Sciences Division is taking on some of the world’s most important challenges, creating leading-edge technology solutions that have revolutionary impact. Our researchers are redefining the way human beings interact with machines and with one another through machines, as we define what’s next in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and computing for the real world.

SRI’s Speech Technology and Research (STAR) Laboratory brings together a multidisciplinary mix of engineers, computer scientists and linguists. Together our experts build systems for a wide range of applications including signal processing; data indexing and mining; and computer-aided learning.

The STAR Lab at SRI seeks an advanced undergrad or graduate intern in linguistics or a closely related field to contribute to a project aiming to mitigate demographic bias in speech technology. This National Institute of Justice-funded project will conduct a scientific investigation of speaker trait bias in speaker identification (SID) systems. The goal of SID is to determine whether a speaker in a recording is the same as the speaker on a separate recording, kind of like fingerprinting but for voice. Pilot work in our lab found that SID systems are more likely to confuse different speakers for one another if both (1) they both speak the same variety of English, and (2) that variety is not well represented in the training data. This project seeks a new solution to this problem, characterizing the acoustic and model bases of this bias in order to recognize and prevent it.

We seek an intern who uses an American English dialect or speech variety that is historically underrepresented. The intern’s lived experience and speaker intuition, combined with their knowledge of linguistics, is critical to understanding the dimensions along which these SID models are likely to fail, as well as for curating a variety of relevant data. Just a few examples of such speech are African American English/Black American English, Chicano English, or trans voices.

The intern will be able to work remotely. We are open to the intern working part-time now throught the summer or a full time summer intern.

Responsibilities

While your primary task will be curating a highly diverse set of audio data from available corpora, we will work together to pick additional tasks that suit your interests and experience; a few examples are listed below. In addition, we hope that this internship will give you an idea of what a career in speech/linguistics could look like in industry, if that is something you’ve been wondering about.

Required tasks:

• Corpus wrangling (identifying useful data, conducting tests for data quality)
• Attending regular project meetings

Additional tasks can include, depending on intern’s experience and interest:

• Acoustics analyses
• Statistics/data analysis (looking at relationships between acoustic data and model outputs)
• Coding analysis software
• Writing portions of a paper (e.g. literature review, methods, analysis, etc.—you will of course be included in the author list on any and all publications resulting from your work!).

Qualifications

Ideally the intern will be a graduate student (though advanced undergrads are welcome to apply) with:

• Background in sociolinguistics through coursework or research
• At least introductory level phonetics (additional semester preferred)

Please provide a 1 page cover letter as part of your application. If you have any questions or issues adding a cover letter please email with "DEBUTS" in the subject line.

The salary is: $40/hr. Salary ranges will vary and are based on several factors, including geographic location, market competitiveness and equity amongst internal employees in similar roles. Positions may also qualify for SRI's Pay for Outstanding Performance program or the annual Performance Based Compensation program. SRI also has a competitive benefits package