Computational Linguistics: PhD Student, University of Wolverhampton, United Kingdom

Institution/Organization: University of Wolverhampton
Department: Research Group in Computational Linguistics
Web Address: http://clg.wlv.ac.uk

Level: PhD

Duties: Research

Specialty Areas: Computational Linguistics
Interactive Question Answering

Description:

The Research Group in Computational Linguistics, University of Wolverhampton
invites applications for a three-year-funded PhD studentship in Computational
Linguistics. The successful candidate is expected to carry out research in the
domain of interactive question answering. We are looking for candidates with a
good degree in Computational Linguistics, Linguistics, Computer Science or
Information Sciences, with programming skills and some experience in Natural
Language Processing. The studentship is part funded by Unilever.

Required skills:
- degree in Computational Linguistics, Linguistics, Computer Science or
Information Sciences
- experience with at least one of the following: Java, Perl, C++, .NET
- experience in Natural Language Processing
- good command of the English language

Desirable skills:
- Master's degree in Computational Linguistics, Linguistics, Computer Science or
Information Sciences
- experience in question answering, information extraction and/or dialogue systems
- familiarity with a wide range of programming environments and operating systems

Applications must include:
- completed application form available from
http://clg.wlv.ac.uk/jobs/PhD-application.pdf
- CV
- 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 the
studentship, give details of their research interests/experience, background,
programming skills and an outline of any experience in Natural Language
Processing or Linguistics.

Applications should be made both by email and surface mail. The closing date for
applications is 31st January 2009. The short-listed applicants will be
interviewed by email and telephone in the week beginning 2nd February 2009.

The studentship includes a maintenance grant of 12,000 GBP a year and also
covers the tuition fees for 3 years.

The successful candidate is expected to start as soon as possible. She or he
will be working in a vibrant research environment, engaging in active research.
The studentship is part-funded by Unilever.

Established by Prof. Ruslan Mitkov in 1998, the Research Group in Computational
Linguistics 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, named
entity recognition, information extraction, corpus construction and annotation,
automatic terminology processing, multilingual processing, and multiple-choice
question generation. To a large extent, this research has been undertaken in
projects funded by major UK funding bodies and commercial partners.

The results from the recent Research Assessment Exercise announced on 17
December 2008 confirm the Research Group in Computational Linguistics as one of
the top performers in UK research. The research group was entered in Unit of
Assessment 'Linguistics' and Wolverhampton was ranked joint 3rd with 2 more
universities. According to the league tables of the Guardian, The Times and
Research Fortnight, research in Linguistics at the University of Wolverhampton
is one of the top 6 best in the UK.

Application Deadline: 31-Jan-2009

Mailing Address for Applications:
Attn: Dr. Constantin Orasan
Research Institute of Information and Language Processing, Stafford St.
University of Wolverhampton
Wolverhampton WV1 1SB
United Kingdom

Web Address for Applications: http://clg.wlv.ac.uk/jobs/

Contact Information:
Dr. Constantin Orasan
C.Orasan@wlv.ac.uk