Senior Language Modeling Researcher

Our R&D Language Modelling Group is looking for a Senior Language Modelling Researcher to work with on challenging research problems that have a concrete impact on real-world applications – the work you do will impact real users on a daily basis.

You’ll perform a role mixing both research and development of cutting edge technologies by staying current on state-of-the-art algorithms in related fields; evaluating the usage patterns of customers via big data analysis; building models to improve core ASR accuracy of individual products and contributing to the model building codebase, including our deep learning toolkit.

Principal duties and responsibilities:

• Conduct experiments to assess the quality of language models and study the effect of language modelling variants and ancillary natural language processing technology (such as auto-punctuation) on speech recognition accuracy.
• Identify, optimize, and cluster training data.
• Analyse product usage data to identify areas of possible improvement or enhancement of language modelling process, method, and NLP techniques.
• Implement of improved training recipes and NLP prototypes utilizing primarily Python and/or Perl.
• Discuss and present ideas, progress, and results within the research team.
• Improve language modelling performance in multiple languages.
• Perform tasks related to securing and keeping the products, tools, and processes that you are responsible for securing

Knowledge, skills and qualifications – 

Education: Advanced degree (Master’s or PhD) in computer science, computational linguistics, applied mathematics, or a related field.

Minimum years of work experience: 3+ years

Required skills:

• Background in speech technology, computational linguistics, statistical machine translation and/or natural language processing.
• Extensive knowledge and hands-on experience with statistical language modelling, including estimation methods, smoothing, pruning, efficient representation, interpolation, etc.
• Good software engineering skills, knowledge of scripting languages (e.g. shell scripting, Perl, Python) and experience working under both Linux and Windows.
• Solid written and oral communication skills in English.

Preferred skills:

• Explicit (industry or academic) experience with large vocabulary speech recognition.
• Experience with exponential language models, discriminative training, unsupervised adaptation and training.
• Expertise in one or more of the following areas: machine learning, statistical modelling, information retrieval, deep learning, data mining, linguistics.
• Fluent in a second, non-English language.