Open Topics for BA/MA Theses & Programming Projects

Computer-Assisted Language Learning

 

(Cognitive) Corpus Linguistics/Digital Humanities

 

Normalization/Morphology

 

Misc

 

Machine Translation (contact: Prof Rico Sennrich)

  • Measure effect of machine translation quality on downstream performance
  • Automatic error analysis for speech translation
  • Better text representations for non-concatenative morphology
  •  

 

Sentiment Analysis (SA): Manfred Klenner

  • Sentiment Inference as Textual Entailment 
  • Sentiment Inference: Identify micro stance
  • SA for speech synthesis of direct speech
  • SA in literary texts
  • Extracting predicate argument structures from complex NPs
  • Other topics from SA are possible as well

 

Speech and Machine Learning

 

Second Language Acquisition (contact: Prof Volker Dellwo)

There are no open thesis projects at the moment. However, do not hesitate to contact Prof Dellwo or other staff members from the Phonetics & Speech Sciences Group if you are interested in this topic.

 

Aging and Speech Pathology (contact: Prof Volker Dellwo)

  • Temporal processing in aging
  • The effect of aging on speech production (contact: Dr Elisa Pellegrino)

 

Sociophonetics and Dialectology (contact: Prof Stephan Schmid)

  • Variants of /r/ in the Cantons of Basel-City and Basel-Country: a sociophonetic survey
  • VoiceOffsetTime as a cue to the fortis-lenis distinction in Swiss German: acoustic and laryngographic evidence

 

Speech Signal Processing (contact: Prof Volker Dellwo)

  • Use of intonation for voice recognition in tone and non-tone languages
  • Gender classification between different populations
  • The effect of nicotine craving on speech (perception and production)
  • Gender detection before puberty (by adults and same age group)
  • Automatic segmentation of child speech in noisy environment" (contact: Dr Sandra Schwab; in collaboration with Nathalie Dherbey Chapuis, UNIFR)
  • Combining speech recognition system and automatic prominence detection for Computer-Assisted Language Learning (contact: Dr Sandra Schwab)
  • The effect of voice conversion technique on speakers' identity (contact: Dr Elisa Pellegrino)
  • The effect of group size on phonetic convergence and speaker individuality (contact: Dr Elisa Pellegrino)

 

Speech Production

 

Neural Processing of Speech

  • Evaluating mobile fNIRS as a neuroimaging technique in speech & hearing science (contact: Dr Daniel Friedrichs)

 

Experimental Psycholinguistics (contact: Prof. Dr. Lena A. Jäger)

  • The impact of cognitive states on sentence processing
  • Methodological comparison between eye-tracking and self-paced reading for psycholinguistic research
  • Investigating the implications of the animacy hierarchy in German

 

Computational psycholinguistics / Computational Cognitive Science (contact: Prof. Dr. Lena A. Jäger)

  • Comparing human and machine surprisal
  • Inferring subjective vs objective text difficulty from eye movements in reading

 

Cognitively Enhanced / Interpretablee NLP (contact: Prof. Dr. Lena A. Jäger)

  • Predicting text comprehension from eye movements in reading
  • Detection of mental and physical fatigue from eye movements in reading
  • Detection of alcoholization from eye movements in reading
  • Personality classification from eye movements in reading
  • Predicting programming skills from eye movements in code reading
  • Deep neural feature representation of eye-tracking data
  • Predicting foreign language proficiency from eye movements in reading

Contact persons for specific areas

 

  • Language Technology for Heritage Texts (Martin Volk)
  • Machine Translation (Martin Volk, Rico Sennrich, Annette Rios, Mathias Müller)
  • Toponym Recognition (Martin Volk)
  • Speech (Volker Dellwo)
  • Machine Learning (Simon Clematide)
  • Large News Corpora (Simon Clematide)
  • Digital Humanities (Gerold Schneider, Simon Clematide)
  • Morphology (Simon Clematide, Tanja Samardžić)
  • Corpus Linguistics (Gerold Schneider, Tanja Samardžić)
  • CALL (Computer-assisted Language Learning) (Gerold Schneider, Manfred Klenner)
  • Automatic Processing of Sign Language (Sarah Ebling, Annette Rios, Mathias Müller)
  • Language Technology for Accessibility (Sarah Ebling)
  • Processing of Swiss German (Tanja Samardžić)
  • Coreference Resolution (Manfred Klenner)
  • Argumentation Mining (Manfred Klenner)
  • Sentiment Analysis (SA) (Manfred Klenner)
  • Experimental psycholinguistics (Lena A. Jäger)
  • Computational psycholinguistics /  Computational cognitive science (Lena A. Jäger)
  • Cognitively enhanced/interpretable NLP (Lena A. Jäger)