26 January: fyi -- phd funding, Copenhagen

Index of January 2010 | Index of year: 2010 | Full index


*Two Marie Curie PhD Scholarships in Semantic Annotation of Corpora and
Multimodal Communication at the University of Copenhagen*

*Application deadline March 15, 2010*

The Graduate School of the Faculty of Humanities and the Centre for
Language Technology, under the Faculty of Humanities is inviting
applications for two PhD scholarships in semantic annotation of corpora
and multimodal communication starting September 1, 2010 for a period of up
to three years. The positions involve participation in the EU project
CLARA -- Common Language Resources and their Applications, which is a
Marie Curie Initial Training Network receiving funding from European
Commission's 7^th Framework Programme (http://clara.uib.no,
http://ec.europa.eu/research/mariecurieactions/).

The applicants can not be a Danish citizen, except if the applicants have
legally resided and had his/her main activity in a non--associated third
country for at least three of the last four years immediately prior to
his/her employment. Further, applicants must not have resided or performed
their main activity in Denmark more than 12 months in the 3 year period
immediately prior to the start date of the PhD scholarship.

*Semantic Annotation of Corpora*

One PhD scholarship is announced within the CLARA research area
/S//emantic Annotation of Large Corpora/. Semantic corpus annotation is
moving into a new era where also lesser studied languages can provide the
necessary background language resources required for the task. Semantic
corpus annotation can provide the much wanted synergy between large text
repositories and lexical-semantic resources and thereby make text
collections more accessible for different kinds of humanities researchers.
The overall aim of this CLARA research area is to investigate (i) to which
degree current wordnets (currently available for around 60 languages) and
other lexical semantic resources are suitable as lexical semantic resources
for automatic annotation of large, varied corpora (written, spoken and
visual) and (ii) to which degree resources and tools for corpus annotation
are transferable between languages. The research project will include the
study of cross- and multilingual aspects of semantic corpus annotation and
the possibility of technological transfer between languages.

The PhD project should focus on one or more of these aspects of semantic
corpus annotation, and the PhD scholar should relate to relevant lexical
resources (computational lexicons and/or wordnets) and corpora for the
particular language(s) the he or she wishes to work with.

*Multimodal Communication Modeling*

Another PhD Scholarship involves participation in the CLARA subproject
/Multimedia and Multimodal Communication Modeling,/ which is a cooperation
between the University of Copenhagen and Max Planck Institute, Germany. The
overall goal of the subproject is to study human communicative multimodal
behavior empirically.

The objective of the PhD project is to produce insight on essential
aspects of multimodal behavior such as feedback, dialogue management,
information structure and reference, by conducting empirical studies on
audiovisual corpora. Analysis methods will be based on manual annotation
but also on automatic methods such as machine learning. Existing
multimodal corpora and/or multimodal data annotated within the PhD project
will be used to produce empirically-based evidence of how specific
non-verbal behaviors are used in human communication. Relevant research
issues are, for example, to which extent non-verbal behavior may be
captured in formal categories that an algorithm can be trained to
recognize; the importance of the cultural context in interpreting
behavior; or whether a universal core can be defined for non-verbal
behaviors, similarly to what certain linguistic schools have attempted to
do for language. Analyses of multimodal communication in different
cultural settings, communication situations and social contexts are also
relevant.

For the full calls, cf:
http://www.humanities.ku.dk/research/phd/announcements/

Index of January 2010 | Index of year: 2010 | Full index