[Corpora-List] Fully-funded PhD Studentship in Text Mining of Electronic Medical Records

[John Carroll]

Department of Informatics, University of Sussex / Brighton and Sussex Medical School

The student will join a multi-disciplinary team of researchers at the Department of Informatics at the University of Sussex and the Brighton and Sussex Medical School, focusing on making the information in the 'free text' in patients' electronic medical records more accessible and usable for research purposes.

The team has been developing approaches for automatically searching primary care patient record databases for information, such as specific symptoms or related synonyms and abbreviations, which is either not currently available to health services researchers or is difficult to extract. The results are being used for more accurate dating of diagnoses and referrals, and for identifying misclassified cases. For further information, visit http://www.sussex.ac.uk/research/review/2011/environmenthealth and http://www.sussex.ac.uk/calps/prep

The aim of the PhD studentship is to build on this research using natural language processing and supervised machine learning, leveraging recent work to annotate mentions of symptoms and expressions of doubt/certainty in anonymised record text; possibly combined with unsupervised machine learning drawing on larger amounts of unannotated anonymised records. The methods will be validated through application to tasks such as early detection of drug side-effects.

The student will be jointly supervised by Prof Jackie Cassell at the Brighton and Sussex Medical School (who will provide expertise in health services research) and Prof John Carroll at the Department of Informatics at the University of Sussex (providing expertise in natural language processing). For informal enquiries, please email J.Cassell at bsms.ac.uk or J.A.Carroll at sussex.ac.uk

The successful candidate will have a good honours degree or (ideally) a Masters degree in computer science, artificial intelligence, or a related discipline; they will have excellent programming skills, and experience in natural language processing and machine learning.

The studentship comprises £13,590 maintenance per annum plus tuition fees at the UK/EU rate. Unfortunately, applicants from outside the UK/EU requiring a higher tuition fee contribution cannot be considered.

Start date: January 2012

To apply, email a covering letter and CV to Prof Jackie Cassell at the following address: DA.Epidemiology at bsms.ac.uk.

The CV should include:

1. Contact details (including e-mail addresses) for the applicant and 3 referees who would be available to provide references during October 2011.

2. The applicant's availability for interview at Sussex University during November 2011.

Closing date for applications: 10th October 2011


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