PhD - Multilingual Spoken Language Understanding for Low-Resourced Sub-Saharan African Languages F/M
ref :2025-43661 | 02 Apr 2025
apply before : 30 Sep 2025
- 2 Avenue Pierre Marzin, 22300 LANNION - France
about the role
Your role is to carry out PhD work on : Automatic multilingual speech understanding for sub-Saharan African languages.
Context
Orange operates in 14 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, focusing on data and artificial intelligence to enhance customer experience and establish itself as a leading digital operator in the region. Despite Africa's dynamic growth, it faces significant challenges, including a literacy rate of only 63% in 2023 in Sub-Saharan African countries, with many literate individuals lacking proficiency in French or English. This considerably limits access to digital technologies for a large portion of the population.
To address PhD thesis challenges, Orange aims to develop speech technologies to better understand customers who will be able to speak in their native languages. However, most existing voice-based solutions are available only in major international languages, making it difficult to cater to the continent's approximately 2,000 languages and dialects. The proposed research will explore innovative machine learning strategies to create speech recognition and speech understanding models for the languages spoken in Orange footprint, utilizing end-to-end approaches that enhance efficiency and robustness.
Given the limited availability of textual data for African languages, the candidate will need to devise methods to overcome this challenge, focusing on speech analysis, cross-language intrinsic characteristics discovery and pooling, to minimize reliance on written annotations. The research will involve exploring neural network techniques, such as self-supervised learning and transfer learning, to identify meaningful acoustic units without human annotations.
about you
Required diploma:
- Master 2 in Natural Language Processing, Computer Science, Data Science or Mathematics
Expected proficiencies:
- Skills in Natural Language Processing (Automatic Speech Recognition, Spoken Language Understanding, Data Mining, GenAI or LLM)
- Strong skills in Deep Learning (architectures, algorithmes and methods)
- Advanced knowledge of the Python language and deep learning libraries (huggingface_hub, etc.)
- In-depth knowledge of a deep learning framework (Pytorch, Tensorflow2, Jax, etc.)
additional information
You will contribute to research activities focusing on digital and social inclusion, with the aim of providing people in Sub-Saharan Africa with new voice interaction modalities in languages they use daily. Your work will provide a solution to an unresolved issue and will enhance understanding on low-resource modelling and frugality.
Your research can be showcased through publication calls at international conferences and will contribute to collaborative international projects.
Additionally, you will work in a supportive, multidisciplinary environment alongside experienced researchers.
Finally, you will have access to powerful computing clusters to conduct your research under optimal conditions.
department
Orange Innovation brings together the research and innovation activities and expertise of the Group's entities and countries. We work every day to ensure that Orange is recognized as an innovative operator by its customers, and we create value for the Group and the Brand in each of our projects. With 720 researchers, thousands of marketers, developers, designers and data analysts, it is the expertise of our 6,000 employees that fuels this ambition every day.
Orange Innovation anticipates technological breakthroughs and supports the Group's countries and entities in making the best technological choices to meet the needs of our consumer and business customers. You will be an integral part of a team of around twenty people, including about ten researchers, working in the field of deep learning and with a strong experience in voice technologies (speech transcription, speaker identification, analysis of voice attributes), but also more fundamental subjects (under-resourced languages, frugal learning, explicability). The team also includes development engineers, integrators, other PhD students and interns.
contract
Thesis
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