PhD Studentship in Computational Linguistics/Psycholinguistics

[Frank Keller]

------------------------- Please post -------------------------


PHD STUDENTSHIP IN COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS/PSYCHOLINGUISTICS
School of Informatics
University of Edinburgh

The Institute of Communicating and Collaborative Systems (ICCS) within
the School of Informatics and the Human Communication Research Centre
(HCRC) invites applications for an EPSRC-funded three-year PhD
studentship starting by May 1, 2006. The successful applicant will
work on a project that investigates the role of prediction in human
parsing. The aim of the project is to use probabilistic techniques
from computational linguistics to develop a broad-coverage, fully
implemented model of the prediction processes that occur in human
sentence comprehension. The model will be evaluated against
eye-tracking corpora and data from reading experiments. It is also
planned to investigate the crosslinguistic aspects of the model by
extending it to languages other than English. Eye-tracking corpora
exist for German and French, and new languages are currently being
added.

The EPSRC baseline rate for maintenance is approximately GBP 12.000
per year and the studentship also covers tuition fees at the home/EU
rate. Applicants should have a good honors degree or equivalent in
cognitive science, computational linguistics, psycholinguistics,
computer science, or a related discipline. Programming skills,
preferably in Perl, Java, C, or C++, are required. Familiarity with
statistical modeling, corpus processing, parsing algorithms,
psycholinguistic experimentation is an advantage.

For further information about please contact Dr. Frank Keller
(keller at inf.ed.ac.uk). Application forms and details on how to apply
are available from:

http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/postgraduate/apply.html

On your application, please indicate "Studentship: Prediction in Human
Parsing".

Application deadline: January 31, 2006.

Applications received after the deadline may be considered, but this
cannot be guaranteed.