[Corpora-List] Metaphor job

[Alan Wallington]

Readers of the list might be interested in a post-doctoral research post 
in the Figurative Language Research Group in the School of Computer 
Science at the University of Birmingham, UK.

The post is available from the 1st of October 2005 and will last until 
the 30th of June 2008 with the possibility of a slight extension of a 
few months.

The successful applicant will join an EPSRC-funded project recently 
awarded to Professor John Barnden and Drs Alan Wallington, Sheila 
Glasbey and Mark Lee entitled "Coping with the Open-Endedness of 
Everyday Metaphorical Language: theory, corpus study and computational 
implementation," an informal description of which can be found at 
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~amw/Metaphor/informal.html.

The project is inter-disciplinary in scope and is concerned with 
investigating, describing, and formalising the type of information that 
is unchanging between the source/vehicle and the target/tenor of a 
metaphorical utterance.

It is intended that the post-holder will concentrate primarily on the 
formal description of the above type of ‘invariant’ information using an 
‘event-based’ formalism and on helping to implement the resulting 
descriptions within the ‘ATT-Meta’ system for reasoning with the 
contents of metaphorical descriptions (see 
http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~jab/ATT-Meta). However, we shall consider 
applicants with interests in other aspects of the project.

Candidates should have a Ph.D or equivalent experience. They should want 
to engage in a careful and sensitive investigation of English and should 
enjoy working in an interdisciplinary field. Preference will be given to 
candidates who are able to offer many of the following: computational 
linguistics; linguistics; Artificial Intelligence; experience of 
developing large systems; knowledge of formal approaches to reasoning; 
Prolog; evidence of sensitivity to the use of metaphor and figurative 
language; publications skills and desire to publish; self motivation and 
the ability to work collaboratively.

The deadline for applications is Thursday, September the 15th. 
Interviewing will commence in the final week of September.

Salary will be up to £22507 per annum depending on experience.

For an application form please contact Jo Gerald at 
<J.A.Gerald at bham.ac.uk> tel: +44 (0)121 414 7415.

For more details about the project please contact John Barnden (email: 
J.A.Barnden at cs.bham.ac.uk, tel +44 (0)121 4143816) or Alan Wallington 
(email: A.M.Wallington at cs.bham.ac.uk, tel: +44 (0)121 4142795).