25 April: fyi -- phd funding, NL
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Tilburg University - PhD position vacancy
The Department of Communication and Information Sciences at Tilburg
Unviersity (Tilburg, The Netherlands) has an opening for a PhD RESEARCHER
for the project "MEMPHIX: MEMory-based paraPHrasing with Implicit and
eXplicit semantics", which belongs to the research programme "Making Sense".
Vacancy number 500.08.13, 4 years, fulltime
Faculty of Humanities, Department of Communication and Information Sciences:
The Department of Communication and Information Sciences in the Faculty of
Humanities is dedicated to research and education in the areas of language
technology, human-computer interaction, professional communication, and
discourse studies. It offers bachelor's and master's programmes in business
communication and digital media; a master's programme in human aspects of
information technology; and it participates in an inter-university research
master's programme in language and communication. It is home to two research
programmes, one in language technology and computational linguistics
("Making Sense: Computational models for learning to understand and generate
natural language"), directed by Prof. dr. Harry Bunt and Prof. dr. Antal van
den Bosch, and one in communication, cognition and discourse studies
("Multimodality and Cognition"), directed by Prof. dr. Fons Maes and Prof.
dr. Marc Swerts. The department has an inspiring working environment with an
international orientation and good computing facilities.
Summary of the project:
The ability to paraphrase, i.e. to say the same thing in another way, can
serve a variety of purposes. It can serve to explain something or to provide
feedback in dialogue. Generating shorter paraphrases is useful for subtitles
or news feeds. Paraphrasing can also change the register of a text: from
formal speak to street language, or from old-fashioned prose to present-day
language. In the MEMPHIX project, a system is built that learns to generate
paraphrases on the basis of examples. The project makes use of a
memory-based translation system (MBMT), developed within the NWO VICI
project "Implicit Linguistics". The MBMT technology can be straightforwardly
trained on pairs of paraphrases.
While the generation of paraphrases can be driven in the first place by
surface similarities (leaving semantics completely implicit, just as in a
statistical MT system), explicit semantic information may also play a role,
such as the semantic roles of NPs and the coreference relations between NPs
and pronouns. Such information may be computed through automatic means
(parsing, semantic role labeling, co-reference resolution). The project will
compare the direct implicit route with the use of explicitly computed
semantics. This part of the project will join forces with an international
effort of the ISO organization aimed at developing semantic annotation
formalisms with a well-defined semantics.
The project will make use of a richly annotated Dutch corpus of 1 million
words developed in the STEVIN Daeso-project, consisting of pairs of texts
that express paraphrased or at least comparable information from various
domains. While the Dutch language will be a core object of study, the
methods are language-independent, and so other paraphrasing corpora will be
considered as well to explore alternative routes to gather paraphrase
subcorpora beyond the 1 million word scale.
The MEMPHIX project will be carried under the guidance of prof. dr. Antal
van den Bosch, and will be aligned with the NWO VICI project "Implicit
Linguistics" (Van den Bosch), the ISO project "Semantic Annotation
Framework" (Prof. dr. Harry Bunt), and the STEVIN project "Daeso" (Tilburg
partners: prof. dr. Emiel Krahmer and dr. Erwin Marsi).
Requirements:
The candidate has an honours or (research) master degree (or equivalent) in
communication & information sciences, computational linguistics, or a
relevant related area, with a a background in statistical NLP and/or
machine learning, corpus linguistics, and computational semantics, and with
some experience in programming.
The candidate is expected to have a strong interest in doing research,
excellent writing skills and a good command of English. Applicants should
have, or be willing to develop, active knowledge of spoken and written
Dutch, which is the target language within the project.
Further information:
For more information about the project please contact Antal van den Bosch
via email (antal.vdbosch@uvt.nl)
or telephone (+31.13.466.3117). For information about the Department of
Communication and Information Sciences and the Faculty of Humanities please
contact Harry Bunt (head of department) via email (href="harry.bunt@uvt.nl">harry.bunt@uvt.nl) or telephone
(+31.13.466.8118).
Relevant links: Tilburg University (href="http://www.uvt.nl">http://www.uvt.nl or href="http://www.tilburguniversity.nl/">http://www.tilburguniversity.nl);
Department of Communication and Information Sciences (href="http://www.tilburguniversity.nl/faculties/humanities/dci/">http://www.tilburguniversity.nl/faculties/humanities/dci/).
Terms of employment:
Tilburg University is rated among the top Dutch employers, offering
excellent terms of employment. The collective labour agreement of Tilburg
University applies. The selected candidates will start with a contract for
one year, concluded by an evaluation. Upon a positive outcome of the
first-year evaluation, the candidate will be offered an employment contract
for the remaining years.
The starting salary is 2.000 euros gross per month in the first year, up to
2.558 euros in the 4th year. The selected candidate is expected to have
written a PhD thesis by the end of the contract (which may be based on
articles).
Applications
Applications should include cover letter, Curriculum Vitae, and names of two
references. Application letters should be sent before the application
deadline of May 15, 2008, by regular mail to mr. P. van Balen, Human
Resources, Faculty of Humanities, Room D304, Tilburg University, P.O. Box
90153, NL-5000 LE Tilburg, The Netherlands or by email to
solliciterenfdl@uvt.nl". In your letter, please refer to the relevant
vacancy code.
It is the policy of the university to increase the number of women employed.
Also members of ethnic minority groups and handicapped people are expressly
invited to apply.
--
Harry Bunt
Chair of Language and Information Science
Head, Department of Communication and Information Sciences
Faculty of Humanities, Tilburg University
P.O. Box 90153, 5000 LE Tilburg, Netherlands
phone: +31-13.466.81.18 (secretary Femke Wieme)
fax: +31-13.466.29.92
http://let.uvt.nl/general/people/bunt/
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