Our September 2023 intake ("Cohort 5") was our final cohort of students. We are no longer recruiting students to join the CDT. 

However, the CDT has funds available to support two affiliated, fully-funded 3.5 year PhD studentships in Spoken Language Technologies. As an affiliated student, you will be welcome to participate in CDT activities and events but you will not be a formal member of the CDT and you will undertake the University of Sheffield's standard Doctoral Development Programme (DDP) training programme as opposed to the CDT's PGDip training programme. You will start in September 2025.

Home and International students may apply. Regardless of your fees status (Home or International), all fees will be paid (in addition to a full stipend). International candidates should be aware that the award does not cover funding for costs related to relocation to the UK, such as visa fees or the NHS surcharge. 

These studentships are currently advertised on jobs.ac.uk and FindAPhD.

We are seeking two candidates to each work on a specific project in Spoken Language Technologies research. These projects specifically target interdisciplinary research, covering both fields of speech and language research. 

The projects are jointly supervised by Prof Thomas Hain (a world leader in speech recognition and Fellow of the International Speech Communication Association, ISCA) and Prof Rob Gaizauskas (internationally known for his research on information extraction and text mining, temporal information processing, question answering and summarisation). 

You will be working on one of the following topics:

Project 1: Accessible Democracy

UK Houses of Parliament and cross-party Select Committees are at the core of our democracy. Making the proceedings of these bodies accessible to citizens and journalists is key to holding politicians accountable. This research aims to develop technologies to provide access to the rich linguistic and paralinguistic information in parliamentary audio recordings. Helping journalists to identify newsworthy events is one of the example objectives, alongside more standard tasks such as search, creating alerts or summarisation.

Project 2: Analytics of Conversations

Spoken conversations are complex and difficult to understand for AI systems. While the words spoken are of obvious importance, paralinguistic information often plays an essential role for a satisfactory and efficient exchange. In practice only goal oriented metrics are used to assess the quality of an exchange, which are not helpful to describe a wide range of conversations such as interviews, story telling or even examinations. Modelling of the participants’ knowledge and state as well as paralinguistic signalling and perception should be used to research novel methods to interpret and understand conversations. 

Project 3: Evolving Communication in Embodied Agents

Spoken and written language have developed in the course of human evolution and can be viewed as key species-wide adaptations that have enabled us to better survive on our planet. Modelling the development of language in artificial agents with sensory apparatus that are embedded in a physical environment is an exciting research methodology that promises both deeper understanding of human languages and their origins,  as well as insights into how to build more effective autonomous agents. This research will build on the state of the art in this area. 

The studentship offers you the following benefits:

• Fully funded 3.5 year studentship covering Home or International tuition fees and an enhanced stipend at the basic UKRI rate plus £3,500 (totalling £24,280 per year, tax free for 2025/26)*.

• Research and training support grant of £2,500 per annum to cover research expenses and conference attendance. 

• Supervision from world-renowned academics.

• Laptop and dedicated desk in the CDT's student workspace equipped with external monitors, keyboard and mouse, and headset.

• Exposure to the cross-disciplinary approaches and co-creation of novel SLT methods and applications.

• A dedicated workspace purely for CDT and affiliated students within a collaborative and inclusive research environment hosted by the School of Computer Science.

• Enrollment on the University of Sheffield's Doctoral Development Programme (DDP) training programme. 

• Work and live in Sheffield – a cultural centre on the edge of the Peak District National Park which is in the top ten most affordable UK university cities (4th in the Unifresher Cheapest Cities In The UK For Students To Live In 2023; 6th in the NatWest Student Living Index 2024).

* Tax and National Insurance: Stipend payments are training awards and not regarded as income for income tax purposes. Earnings received from sources such as teaching and demonstrating may be taxable and should be aggregated with income from any employment when assessing income tax liability in any tax year – this is particularly relevant for the tax year in which the award ends. It is your responsibility to ensure you understand your tax liabilities throughout your award. The University and UKRI are not able to provide advice on tax, national insurance, pensions or on benefits issues.

No additional payments will be made for your National Insurance contributions. You can, if you wish, pay contributions as non-employed persons. You should consult your local office of the Department for Work and Pensions about your position to determine the impact of non-payment of contributions on any future claims for benefit including the basic State Pension. You may become liable for contributions in connection with any paid teaching or demonstrating which you undertake.