Project Studentships

Some of the research grants awarded to the School of Informatics include funds for training students. These funds allow students to study towards the PhD in Informatics and usually cover tuition fees, research costs, and a stipend to cover living expenses.

PHD STUDENTSHIP IN NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING, SCHOOL OF INFORMATICS

The School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh invites applications for a three-year PhD studentship starting in September 2010. The student will be based in the Institute of Communicating and Collaborative Systems (ICCS) and the Human Communication Research Centre (HCRC), which together form one of the world's largest concentration of researchers studying the theoretical, computational, and cognitive aspects of language and speech.

The studentship is associated with the European Research Council project "Synchronous Linguistic and Visual Processing". The aim of the project is to investigate the cognitive processes that unfold when humans view a visual scene and listen to a speech stimulus at the same time. The project encompasses both experimental research using eye-tracking and computational work using machine learning and probabilistic modeling.

The student will be supervised by Dr. Frank Keller, and will work on a topic drawn from following research areas:

probabilistic parsing, including unsupervised parsing, crosslinguistic parsing, and synchronous parsing
models of human language processing, including models that integrate syntactic and semantic processing
computational approaches that combine language and image processing
models of eye-tracking data in reading and visual scenes, including applications such as readability assessment or post-editing

The successful candidate will have a good honors degree or equivalent in computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, computer science, or a related discipline. He/she will have strong programming skills and previous experience in natural language processing, e.g., in parsing, machine translation, or cognitive modeling,

The studentship will provide maintenance only funding at an enhanced research council rate. Applications are restricted to UK/EU citizens. The start date of the studentship is flexible, but can be no later than September 1, 2010.

If you have further questions, please contact Dr Frank Keller (keller@inf.ed.ac.uk). To apply, please follow the instructions at: http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/postgraduate/apply.html

As your research area, please select "Institute of Communicating and Collaborative Systems". On the application form under "Research Project", please state "ERC Studentship: Synchronous Processing".

On your application, please indicate "ERC Studentship: Synchronous Processing".

Application deadline: May 15, 2010.

Applications received after the deadline may be considered, but this cannot be guaranteed.

Please refer to our Scholarships and Financial Aid page for details of other sources of funding and the research topics page for details of other projects, some of which may have funding for PhD study available.

For further information and guidance please see our Application FAQ and our Funding FAQ.