Bielefeld University Faculty of Linguistics and Literature Faculty of Technology

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Study Program

Specific Goals of the Training Program in Connections with the Research Program

The doctoral theses pursued in the graduate program are applied to an interdisciplinary research program, which has the following features as characteristics: scenarios with task oriented communication form the basis, with the priority on verbal control of practical tasks. Aspects of a scenario are the subject on different research levels and the point of emphasis. These points of emphasis refer to:

	features of natural language task oriented communication, i.e. structural regularities, cognitive processing, inferential processes, situated grounding, action control;
	features of spoken language resp. of processing systems of spoken language, i.e. judging of recognition hypotheses, the use of linguistic and task specific restrictions for the limitation of search areas, robustness, real time processing; integration of speech and image processing;
	features of interacting multimodal human-machine-systems.

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Duration and Structure of the Graduate Training

The study program is essentially made up of the following research accompanied events:

1.	Series of lectures In the series of lectures (2 semester hours), held by the applicants, different work areas of the graduate program and the multifold connections between linguistics and computer sciences are shown.
2.	Courses The courses in a semester (2 semester hours), which belong to the research accompanying events, are offered by university teachers from the graduate program and guest researchers and cover project areas of the graduate program resp. topics with a wider range. Two types of courses are offered which are related to the topics of the graduate program,   interdisciplinary courses, mandatory courses for all scholarship holders, and   research area specific courses, mandatory courses depending on the orientation of the content of each disserational project.
3.	Seminars The graduate students organize and carry out a seminar (2 semester hours) concerning current research questions. In this framework guests are invited to the appropriate seminar class and are available for intensive discussions. The aim of this is to get into contact with leading workgroups in the relevant fields.
4.	Research Colloquium The research colloquium (2 semester hours) is made up of contributions from university teachers in the graduate program, guest researchers, and the graduate students. In the first semester of the graduate program the applicants present their research areas and their parts in the research program of the graduate program. The comparability, complementarity of the research areas, theoretical approaches and methods concerning specific scenarios are highlighted. In the following semesters the graduate students present work from their doctoral projects.
5.	Meetings in Camera These are one- to two-day long meetings, which are only for the graduate students and the university teachers affiliated with the graduate program. Such a meeting serves the purpose of intensive discussions about the doctoral projects in an informal context outside of the university. These meetings take place once a year in addition to once at the beginning of the graduate program.
6.	Workshops Two workshops are held within the three-year period of the graduate program. The first one at the end of the first year resp. at the beginning of the second year and the second one at the end of the second year resp. at the beginning of the third year. The first workshop is organized by the university teachers affiliated with the graduate program and external lecturers, the second one is organized by the graduate students, who will present the results of their research in the context of a research forum.

The structure of the study program is as follows:

The courses have the following topics:

Course 1:	Task related communication: types of empirical and theoretical research (one applicant each from these two research areas)
Course 2:	Linguistic, perceptional, and senso-motor information processing/information generation and modi for their integration (one applicant each from these two research areas)
Course 3:	Communication and emotion (one applicant each from these two research areas)
Course 4:	Multimodality: levels of representation (signals, shapes, symbols) and annotation systems (one applicant each from these two research areas)

List of research area specific course (according to research area):

	Multmodal speech processing (Rickheit, Strohner)
	Connectionist language models (Eikmeyer)
	Speech production and reception (Eikmeyer, Rickheit, Strohner)
	Text coding procedures and editors for multimodal annotations (Metzing/Milde)
	Behavioral descriptions and time representations (Milde/Metzing)
	Text technological bases for the integration of multimodal data (Milde/Metzing)
	Doctor-patient communication (Gülich)
	Profession-layman-communication (Gülich)
	Mimics and gesture in social interaction (Krafft/Dausendschön-Gay)
	Body and language (Dausendschön-Gay/Krafft)
	Media mediated communication (Dausendschön-Gay)
	Computer linguistic bases for the representation and processing of parallel streams of information (Gibbon/Gut/Fink)
	Event-control concepts for multimodal input streams (Gibbon/Gut/Fink)
	Prosodic phonologies as theories of parallel submodalities (Gibbon/Gut/Fink)
	Bayesian networks: representations of uncertain and heterogenous data (Kummert)
	Evaluation of linguistic, gestural, and visual information using bayesian networks (Kummert)
	Neural information processing (Ritter)
	Machine learning (Ritter)
	Datamining (Ritter)
	Robotics (Ritter)
	Partial obversable Markov decision process: a probabilistic representation formalism for the modelling of cognitive decision processes (Sagerer)
	Approaches for the modelling of natural calcuation (Sagerer)

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