7 April: fyi -- PhD funding (x3), UK
Index of April 2007 | Index of year: 2007 | Full index
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3 PHD STUDENTSHIPS: MULTIPLE CHOICE TEST ITEM GENERATION
(=A310,000 first year, =A311,000 second year, =A312,000 third year)
Closing date: 2nd April 2007
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The Research Group in Computational Linguistics, University of Wolverhampto=
n invites applications for three-year-funded PhD studentships in Computatio=
nal Linguistics. Three positions will be available. Successful candidates a=
re expected to carry out work on multiple-choice test item generation, with=
their research covering, but not limited to, one or more of the following =
areas:=20
(1) syntactic processing for real-world NLP applications (with particular r=
eference to multiple choice time item generation);=20
(2) development of a multiple choice test item generation system for Spanis=
h;
(3) proposal of high quality distractors for multiple-choice test items in =
the biomedical domain.
Students involved in area (1) should direct their activities toward the acc=
urate syntactic-semantic analysis of complex sentences, proposing a treatme=
nt which takes issues such as co-ordination and punctuation into account. T=
his research will be applied to a real-world NLP application such as inform=
ation extraction in the domain of biomedicine. Area (2) will address the im=
plementation and tuning of a Spanish-language system that will be drawn fro=
m the existing system for English. A good command of the Spanish language w=
ill be vital for this task together with excellent programming skills and t=
he ability to develop and harness lexical and ontological resources in this=
context. The integration of additional NLP techniques for Spanish such as =
named entity recognition or temporal processing will also be addressed in t=
his area. Research in area (3) may involve the development of new processin=
g units for entailment recognition and temporal processing. These units wil=
l be used to derive causal relationships in biomedical texts in order to en=
hance the quality of automatically proposed distractors closely related to =
the focus of the test items. The student's activities may also include auto=
matic recognition of textual entailment as well as approaches to the identi=
fication of morphological and lexical similarity.=20
In their studies, the students will have access to and will benefit from al=
l the resources developed in an existing related project. This includes the=
opportunity to conduct user-evaluation, which will be very beneficial in t=
he development of the system modules. In return, part of the PhD work will =
be integrated in the system to be developed during the project. Further inf=
ormation on related research can be found in the papers:
Mitkov, R. and Ha, L. A. (2003): Computer-Aided Generation of Multiple-Choi=
ce Tests. In Proceedings of the HLT-NAACL 2003 Workshop on Building Educati=
onal Applications Using Natural Language Processing, Edmonton, Canada, May,=
pp. 17 =96 22 ( http://clg.wlv.ac.uk/papers/ruslan-NAACL-03.pdf )
Mitkov, R., Ha, L. A., and Karamanis, N. (2006) A computer-aided environmen=
t for generating multiple-choice test items. Natural Language Engineering, =
Volume 12, Issue 02, June 2006, pp 177-194. doi: 10.1017/S1351324906004177,=
Published online by Cambridge University Press 22 May 2006. ( http://journ=
als.cambridge.org/action/displayIssue?jid=3DNLE&volumeId=3D12&issueId=3D02 )
We are looking for candidates with a good honours degree in Linguistics, Co=
mputational Linguistics, Computer Science or Information Sciences, with pro=
gramming skills and some experience in Natural Language Processing. =20
Required skills:
- degree in Linguistics, Computational Linguistics, Computer Science or Inf=
ormation Sciences
- experience with at least one of the following: Java, Perl, C, C++, .NET
knowledge of linguistics with a particular emphasis on syntax and the relat=
ionship between syntax and semantics.
- experience in Natural Language Processing including real-world applicatio=
ns such as information extraction or question answering
- good command of the English language (Areas (1) and (3) or Spanish (2))
Desirable skills:
- Master's degree in Linguistics, Computational Linguistics, Computer Scien=
ce, or Information Sciences
- experience in syntactic parsing, syntactic theory, corpus linguistics, an=
d or information extraction
- some familiarity with programming languages such as Perl, C, or Java.
Applications should be sent to
Mr. Richard Evans
Research Institute of Information and Language Processing
University of Wolverhampton
Stafford St.
Wolverhampton
WV1 1SB
United Kingdom
E-mail: R.J.Evans@wlv.ac.uk
and must include:
- completed application form available from
http://clg.wlv.ac.uk/jobs/jobs.php
- CV
- names, emails, and telephone numbers of three referees
- copy of university degree (in English)
- copy of transcript listing all university marks (in English)
- evidence of postgraduate qualification if applicable
- a covering letter in which candidates explain why they have applied for t=
he studentship, give details of their research
interests/experience, background, programming skills and an outline of any =
experience in Natural Language Processing or Linguistics.
- a PhD plan (about 1000 words) which proposes research questions relating =
to the generation of multiple choice test items to to be addressed, the aca=
demic or intellectual context in which the proposed work is located and the=
methodology likely to be employed. A brief action plan should also be prov=
ided. The field of this PhD MUST be applicable to the automatic generation =
of multiple choice test items.=20
Applications should be made by email. The closing date for applications is =
2nd April 2007. Short-listed applicants will be contacted and notified of t=
he specific date of interviews to be held in April (email and telephone). S=
uccessful candidates will have to register no later than June.
The studentship includes a maintenance grant of 10,000 GBP for the first ye=
ar, 11,000 GBP for the second year and 12,000 GBP for the third year and al=
so covers the tuition fees for 3 years.
The successful candidate will be working in a vibrant research
environment, engaging in active research. This studentship is funded by an =
externally funded project, CAID, so it is expected that the appointed stude=
nt will contribute to this project as well. In return, the student will hav=
e access and will benefit from the resources developed in the project.
The RESEARCH GROUP IN COMPUTATIONAL LINGUISTICS at the University of Wolver=
hampton ( http://clg.wlv.ac.uk )
Established by Prof. Mitkov in 1997, the Research Group in Computational Li=
nguistics is a highly successful one, delivering cutting-edge research in a=
number of NLP areas such as anaphora resolution, automatic summarisation, =
question answering, lexical knowledge acquisition, text categorisation, nam=
ed entity recognition, information extraction, corpus construction and anno=
tation, automatic terminology processing, multilingual processing, and mult=
iple-choice question generation. To a large extent, this research has been =
undertaken in projects funded by
major UK funding bodies and commercial partners.
For further information/queries, please contact:
Mr. Richard Evans
Phone: +44 1902 322 623
Email: R.J.Evans@wlv.ac.uk
------------------------------
Richard Evans
Computational Linguistics Research Group
Research Institute of Information and Language Processing
University of Wolverhampton
United Kingdom
http://clg.wlv.ac.uk/
R.J.Evans@wlv.ac.uk
Index of April 2007 | Index of year: 2007 | Full index