PhD Student Support: NTU, Singapore

[Francis Bond]

University or Organization: Nanyang Technological University
Department:   Linguistics and Multilingual Studies
Location:  Singapore
Web Address: http://www.ntu.edu.sg/HSS/Linguistics/

Level: PhD

Specialty Areas: Computational Linguistics; WSD
	  	 Language Documentation
		 Psycholinguistics

Description:

The Division of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies (LMS) at NTU
invites applications for three PhD Studentships, funded by the college
of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.

LMS has a focus on the study of the languages of multilingual
individuals and of multilingual societies. Research in the division is
geared towards a deepening of our understanding of multilingualism
through empirical studies of topics such as language description and
documentation, language contact, loanword phonology, machine
translation, language maintenance, and multilingual language
processing and acquisition.


Language documentation:

Suitably qualified people are invited to apply to undertake research
on a hitherto undescribed (or scantily described) Tibeto-Burman,
Austro-Asiatic or Indic language of the north-east India/Burma region,
leading to a comprehensive grammatical description of that language.
This project forms part of a larger initiative to document the
languages of north-east India and adjacent regions of Asia.

The ideal applicant will have a solid grounding in descriptive
linguistics and already hold an MA, or a BA with a good Honours grade.
Successful applicants can anticipate doing one year of coursework,
followed by three years of empirically-based research. After
completion of the coursework year, the candidate will undertake a 9-12
month period of fieldwork that will involve living in the speech
community to record, transcribe and analyse linguistic data. S/he will
then return to Singapore to complete the first draft of the grammar
and prepare the corpus of materials for archiving. A second trip of 3
months will be made in the final year to check the analysis of the
data.

Interested applicants should contact Dr Alexander Coupe
(arcoupe at ntu.edu.sg) to discuss a possible project.



Psycholinguistics :

Suitably qualified people are invited to apply to undertake research
on bilingual sentence processing using ERP or behavioral methods.

Interested applicants should contact Dr Nayoung Kwon
(nayoung at ntu.edu.sg) to discuss a possible project.


Computational Linguistics:

Suitably qualified people are invited to apply to undertake research
on constraining meaning using aligned texts.  This is part of research
on developing a detailed multilingual analysis of structure and
meaning using parallel texts in Chinese, English and Japanese.
Structural analysis primarily uses head driven phrase structure
grammars (in cooperation with the Deep Linguistic Processing using
HPSG Initiative).  Semantic analysis use WordNets for all three
languages.  The research aims to improve both computational modeling
of meaning and techniques for word sense disambiguation.

Interested applicants should contact Dr Francis Bond (bond at ieee.org)
to discuss a possible project.

General Description:

 * The award is for up to four years (subject to good progress).

 * The monthly stipends for Ph.D students will be S$2,300 for
Singapore Citizens, S$2,200 for Singapore Permanent Residents and
S$2,000 for international students.

 * For students who pass the Ph.D. Qualifying
Examination/Confirmation, the stipend may be increased to S$2,800 for
Singapore Citizens, S$2,700 for Singapore Permanent Residents S$2,500
for international students, subject to good performance in research
and the attainment of required standards for courses taken.

 * In addition to the monthly stipend, the award also covers the
annual tuition fee and the annual computer fee.

 * NTU will normally help you find accommodation on campus.

For more details see:
http://admissions.ntu.edu.sg/graduate/scholarships/Pages/ResearchScholarship.aspx


-- 
Francis Bond <http://www3.ntu.edu.sg/home/fcbond/>
Division of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies
Nanyang Technological University