[Corpora-List] PhD Studentships at Sussex

[David Weir]

                          UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX

                   DEPARTMENT OF INFORMATICS

                        PhD Studentships Available

Two 3-year PhD studentship are available starting on or around 1 October
2003 associated with the following two UK EPSRC-funded projects.

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`COGENT: Controlled Generation of Text',

Natural Language Generation (NLG) technology has reached a level of
maturity where applied systems exist in a range of specialised
real-world domains (such as weather bulletins, software documentation,
health and legal advice and stock market movements). However, developing
such systems currently involves hand-crafting and special-purpose tuning
by NLG experts which is non-portable, non-scaleable, time-consuming and
expensive. Wider deployment of language generation requires more
generally applicable and reusable NLG components based on wide-coverage
grammars; however, at present effective techniques for such
wide-coverage generation are not well understood.

The COGENT project will investigate systematically the characteristics
of wide-coverage generation and to develop techniques for controlling it
effectively. As well as furthering our understanding of wide-coverage
generation, the project aims to deliver a substantial and novel resource
to support future research in this area, and practical implementations
of wide-coverage controllable generators. The project is in
collaboration with ITRI, University of Brighton.

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Natural Language Service Composition

The pervasive computing environment of the future will provide a wide
variety of services within the network. The value of such services will
be greatly enhanced if we are able to tailor our computing environment
by composing services. For example you might want to arrange for your
heating to be turned off when your calendar indicates that you will be
out of your house for more than a day. This project investigates how NLP
techniques can help make service composition a possibility for
non-technical users.  Services, such as heating systems and personal
calendars,  advertise themselves to a service directory that will
develop an ontology of services. This can be exploited to constrain the
discourse domain in which users describe new features. The interface
will guide the user to an unambiguous expression of the new feature that
can be mapped onto a standard component architecture of services.

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These studentships would be suitable for people interested in carrying
out research into areas such as
  * statistical NLG
  * applied natural language semantics,
  * lexical acquisition for practical language processing systems or
  * the association of linguistic knowledge with ontologies

Applicants for these studentships should have a good first degree and/or
postgraduate qualification in computer science, computer processing of
language, or similar. The studentships covers tuition fees for EU
nationals; the projects also pay a (tax-free) stipend starting at UKP
8000 a year. The grants include funds for attendance at relevant
workshops and conferences.

See <http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/lab/nlp/> for information about other
language processing work at the University of Sussex. Interested
candidates should email their CV (as plain text, postscript, or pdf) as
soon as possible to: Dr David Weir, e-mail: davidw at susx.ac.uk.