[Corpora-List] How to get into NLP

[Eric Atwell]

Dear Anthony,

in the UK, many PhD programmes can recruit students in interdisciplinary
areas with a range of backgrounds. For example, here at Leeds
University, your final PhD certificate just states "Leeds University",
not a department or subject.  I now work in the School of Computing, and
i have supervised about 30 PhD students with a range of backgrounds, not
just Comp Sci but also with prior degrees in languages/linguistics, eg:

Claire Brierley (2011) Prosody resources and symbolic prosodic features 
for automated phrase break prediction. PhD Thesis, University of Leeds.
http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/2038/1/thesisBrierleySeptember2011.pdf

Owen Tregurtha Nancarrow (2011) A comparative study of the tagging of 
adverbs in modern English corpora. PhD Thesis, University of Leeds.
http://www.engineering.leeds.ac.uk/teaching/computing/student?cmd=displayabstract&pagetype=soc&sid=200305867

Debra Elliott (2007) Corpus-based machine translation evaluation via 
automated error detection in output texts. PhD Thesis, University of
Leeds. http://etheses.whiterose.ac.uk/221/1/uk_bl_ethos_435782.pdf


I advise you to try to identify a PhD topic whcih builds on your
strengths and expertise in TESOL, and look for a university with an
interdisciplinary view of computing and language.  At Leeds University,
we have computing and langauage researchers collaborting in a range of
departments and research groups, so you mught look for 2 cosupervisors
from different departments on an interdisciplinary project. 
See http://arts.leeds.ac.uk/languageatleeds/
whcih lists Leeds research groups involved in language research: 
Artificial Intelligence, Audiology, Childhood and Inclusive Education,
English Language, International Communication, Language Education, Language
and Memory, Language Linguistics and Translation, Medicines Management,
Political Communication.

Other UK universities also offer interdisciplinary research in computing
and language, eg Lancaster, Manchester, Edinburgh, University College
London, Birmingham, etc; you just have to search their websites.

I hope this helps...


Eric Atwell, Associate Professor, Computing and Language,
  I-AIBS Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Biological Systems
  School of Computing, Faculty of Engineering, UNIVERSITY OF LEEDS
  Leeds LS2 9JT, England. TEL: +44-113-3435430  FAX: +44-113-3435468
  WWW: http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/eric
       http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/arabic


On Tue, 28 Jan 2014, Anthony wrote:

> Hello. We are two university English language instructors with Master’s
> degrees in Teaching English as a Second or Foreign Language, and research
> interests in Corpus Linguistics and second language acquisition. Lately, we
> have developed an interest in Natural Language Processing. We would like to
> know the best way to get into NLP, given our backgrounds. Having reviewed a
> number of PHD programmes advertised here on Corpora Request over 2013, it
> seems that most positions require a background in Computer Science,
> Computational Linguistics, or related fields. We are currently familiarising
> ourselves with Python via some freely-available online courses (e.g.,
> Codeacademy, Udacity, Coursera), and we are wondering what else we ought to
> be doing to realise our long-term goals.
> 
> Thank you very much,
> Anthony Schmidt and Jean-Luc Leese
> Pukyong National University
>
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