[Corpora-List] Research scholarship and contract available in Santiago de Compostela (Spain)

[María Paula Santalla del Río]

 	This message summarizes (at the bottom) and completes the general 
information about the currently in course call for Research Personnel 
Training of the Ministry of Science and Education of the Government of 
Spain:

URL: 
http://www.mec.es/planidi/formacion-personal-investigador/2008-orden-bases.html

For, specifically, the research project

Linguistics and Computing Working Together towards Intelligent Question 
Answering (HUM2007-66607-C04-01), directed by professor Guillermo Rojo of 
the Department of Spanish Language of the University of Santiago de 
Compostela

 	Summary of the project:

Text is a powerful channel of communication, but its universally accepted 
ease of access is still an open challenge in the computing sphere. We have 
therefore reached the paradoxical situation in which although a 
practically unlimited amount of knowledge is available to us, the ability 
of non-specialist users to access it has fallen far behind, thus limiting 
its real availability. Information retrieval/extraction (IR/IE) techniques 
have made access and management techniques more flexible, but do not 
wholly fulfil our requirements. There is a real need not only to locate 
information, but also to extract and synthesise it from various sources in 
an interactive process with the user, in what is known as Question 
Answering (QA).

Our proposal applies natural language processing (NLP) and artificial 
intelligence (AI) techniques to develop QA strategies. Our goal is to push 
forward the state of the art on a linguistic basis, combining IR/IE 
techniques with automatic deduction and automatic knowledge 
extraction/representation techniques in order to improve the understanding 
of questions as mechanisms that allow answers to be generated from a 
collection of documents. The domain we have chosen to work in is that of 
finance and economics, since it enables us to profit from currently 
available corpora and the previous experience in the development of NLP 
and IR/IE environments shared by the teams working on this project.

         Summary of the Call: detailed information, as well as the on-line 
system to complete the application form (which is very simple) can be 
found in the URL referred above. Here you can have a brief presentation of 
the more relevant points of the call:

 	a) These are research scholarships and contracts associated to 
research projects supported by the Ministry of Science and Education of 
the Government of Spain.
 	b) These are conceived as means of training graduate students on 
research activities. Students should first follow a two years course of 
so-called PhD training courses, after which they should obtain de DEA 
(Diploma de estudios avanzados, Certificate of Advances Courses). Next, 
students can access the strictly considered research period, another two 
years in which they should be working on the development of a PhD. First 
two years are supported by a research scholarship, second two years are 
supported by a research contract.
 	b) Requirements of the candidates:
 		i) Applicants graduated in Spain: they should have the 
qualifications required to access PhD courses in Royal Decree-Laws 
1393/2007, 56/2005 or 778/1998.
 		ii) Applicants not graduated in Spain: if they are 
graduated by some higher educational institution of the European Higher 
Education Area, no additional requirements apply. If they are graduated by 
some higher educational institution not in the European Higher Education 
Area, they should have the acceptance by the Spanish University in which 
they will be following the above referred courses and research period (in 
our case, the University of Santiago de Compostela).
 	c) Applicants should have been graduated: after 1 january 2004 
(this date can be modified  by the character of the graduation --five-four 
years graduation, or three years graduation in Spain [2003]--, or if the 
applicant can demonstrate that, between 2000 and 2004, he or she has been 
growing children under six years [2000]).
        	d) Duration and salary: 4 years (2 years research scholarship 1141 
per month-- + 2 years research contract 16 422  per year--).
         e) Deadline for application: 13 march 2008
 	g) Contact person in the University of Santiago: 
María Paula Santalla del Río, e-mail: fempsr at usc.es
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