A postdoc position in unsupervised speech recognition is available. It is part of a two-year experimental/computational phonology research project on phonological inventories (GEOMPHON : PI: Ewan Dunbar). The project aims to explain why the sound inventories of human languages show typological tendencies toward being phonetically coherent in various geometrically definable ways; a classical example of this is "economy," whereby the contrasts found in inventories appear to exploit surprisingly small-dimensional feature sub-spaces; others have been discovered more recently (Dunbar and Dupoux 2016, Frontiers in Psychology). Perceptual and artificial language experiments will test explanations of these tendencies. The job of the postdoc will be to explore unsupervised speech representation learning, constructing models inspired by these typological tendencies which will be evaluated by matching their behaviour against the results of new data from the perceptual experiments. The main host laboratory, the Laboratoire de Linguistique Formelle (LLF), is an interdisciplinary research laboratory linked to the Department of Linguistics (UFR Linguistique) at the Université Paris Diderot. The LLF brings together researchers from computational, experimental, theoretical, and descriptive linguistics. The project is a collaboration with the Laboratoire des Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (LSCP) at the École Normale Supérieure (affiliated project members : Emmanuel Dupoux, Sharon Peperkamp). LLF and LSCP are high quality, complementary, environments for the development of researchers specializing in computational or experimental approaches to speech, between them having top-tier expertise in psycholinguistics (developmental and adult), phonetics and phonology, natural language processing, unsupervised speech recognition, language typology, and corpora, both textual and speech. Adjoining labs have expertise and empirical resources in the neural basis of audition. The CoML team (INRIA Cognitive Machine Learning group: http://www.syntheticlearner.net/), of which the postdoc would be a member, organizes the biannual ZeroSpeech Unsupervised Speech Challenge. Requirements: The ideal candidate for the unsupervised speech recognition will have a large amount of experience in machine learning applied to speech, and in constructing cognitively meaningful model evaluations. The postdoc will have defended their dissertation by the start date. The start date is somewhat flexible. The submission deadline is strict and urgent, since visa processing can take some time for non-EU applicants. Start date: April 1, 2017 Salary: Net (after deductions) roughly ¤ 2500 per month. Duration: 12 months, with possible extension for an additional 3 months. Location: Paris, France To apply, send an email to with the following: - an attached CV - an attached brief combined cover letter/statement of interest/brief research statement situating the position within the postdoc's own research goals - names and emails of your recommendation letter writers Have at least two and no more than three letters of reference sent independently to the same address.