[Corpora-List] PhD Studentship at ICCS, School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh

[Fiona McGregor]

Institute for Communicating and Collaborative Systems
School of Informatics,
University of Edinburgh

PhD STUDENTSHIP for September 2005

The School of Informatics invites applications for a three-year
NSF-funded studentship award to commence in September 2005. The successful
applicant will work in the Institute for Communicating and
Collaborative Systems (ICCS) on a project entitled "IMAP: Tracking
Multimodal Communication In Humans And Agents", under the supervision
of Prof. Mark Steedman, in Collaboration with Dr. Max Louwerse of the
University of Memphis.

This project addresses the problem of automatically generating speech
with intonation and facial animation appropriate to content, where
this content includes a representation of information structure, or
relation to the discourse context.  The project will develop a
framework for content specification that allows purely algorithmic
generation of speech via a grammar that covers coordination and
ellipsis as well as intonation structure.  This framework will be
integrated with a discourse planner, and incorporated as a component
in a spoken dialogue system for instructional domains being developed
in collaboration with the the University of Memphis.

Applicants should have a good honours degree or equivalent in
Computer Science or Computational Linguistics.  Familiarity with
current techniques in natural language generation or speech
processing are highly desirable.  Programming experience
is essential.

All candidates are eligible for "home fees" and a maintenance allowance.
For UK and EU residents, this covers all fees.  For non-EU candidates
additional funding to cover overseas fees will be sought.   The maintenance
allowance is currently approx 12,000 pounds sterling per annum.

The School of Informatics was formed in 1998 from the Centre for
Cognitive Science and the Departments of Artificial Intelligence and
Computer Science.  For more information about the Institute for
Communicating and Collaborative Systems (ICCS), see the following home page:

http://www.iccs.informatics.ed.ac.uk/

Information about students, the PhD Programme, and how to apply for a
PhD can be found by following the various links from the following
URL:

http://www.iccs.informatics.ed.ac.uk/study/

Because the normal deadline for application has passed, candidates are
encouraged to contact Prof. Steedman directly to express
interest by 30 April 2005 at the latest (steedman @ ed.ac.uk).