PhD Scholarships

Thu Jul 20 08:17:47 UTC 2006

Saarland University, Saarbruecken, Germany, anticipates the availability
of up to three doctoral scholarships within the

Partnership International for Research and Education (PIRE)

Meaning Representations in Language Understanding
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The partnership for research and education (PIRE), established in 2005,
is a collaborative PhD programme between

* Saarland University, Germany

* the Brown Laboratory for Linguistic Information Processing headed by
Eugene Charniak

* The Johns Hopkins University Center for Language and Speech Processing
(CLSP) headed by Frederick Jelinek

* Charles University (Jan Hajic), Czech Republic.

PIRE is also affiliated with our existing International Graduate College
(IGK) co-operation with Edinburgh University.

Each scholarship is funded for two years in the first instance, normally
extendable for a third year. Doctoral degrees may be obtained in
computational linguistics, phonetics, engineering or informatics, from
Saarland University. The official language of the programme is English,
and dissertations may be written in English or German.

The nature of the cooperation includes:

* Joint supervision of dissertations by lecturers from Saarbruecken and
the US

* A six to twelve months research stay at Brown or Johns Hopkins
University

* An intensive research exchange programme between all four
participating sites (including, for example, an annual two-week forum
attended by college members and lecturers from all four centres)

PhD projects will be in the area of meaning representation for natural
language processing and suitable applications.

Academic staff in Saarbruecken are William Barry, Matthew Crocker,
Martin Kay, Dietrich Klakow, Valia Kordoni, Jonas Kuhn, Manfred Pinkal,
Hans Uszkoreit, and Wolfgang Wahlster

In Prague is Jan Hajic is the coordinator

At Brown University Eugene Charniak and Mark Johnson participate.

Academic staff at Johns Hopkins University are Frederick Jelinek, Jason
Eisner, Bob Frank, Keith Hall, Sanjeev Khudanpur and Paul Smolensky.

The scholarship currently provides EURO 1468 per month (approximately
USD 1835). Additional compensation includes family allowance (where
applicable), travel funding, support for carrying out experiments, and
an additional monthly allowance for the duration of the stay in the US.

Applicants should hold a strong university degree equivalent to the
German Diplom or Magister (e.g. Master's level), in a relevant
discipline. Applicants should not be more than 28 years of age. Female
scientists and international students are particularly encouraged to
apply.

Applications should include:

* a curriculum vitae indicating degrees obtained, disciplines covered
(e.g. list of courses or transcript), publications, and other relevant
experience

* a sample of written work (e.g. research paper, or dissertation,
preferably in English)

* copies of high school and university
certificates two references (to be sent directly to the college speaker
by the deadline)

* an informal cover letter specifying interests, previous knowledge and
activities in any of the relevant research areas.  Where possible it
should include a brief outline of research interests to be pursued
within the scholarship.

Up to three scholarships will be available from October 2006. Your
application should be sent to

PIRE office
Claudia Verburg
Department of Computational Linguistics
Saarland University
P.O. Box 15 11 50
D-66041 Saarbruecken
Germany

by 15. August 2006. Later applications may be considered subject to
availability of scholarships.

For additional information please contact

Prof. Dr. Dietrich Klakow (dietrich.klakow at CoLi.Uni-SB.DE)
PD Dr. Valia Kordoni (kordoni at CoLi.Uni-SB.DE) or
Prof. Dr. Matthew Crocker (crocker at CoLi.Uni-SB.DE)