Language Technology: 2 PhD Students, University of Copenhagen

Institution/ Organization: University of Copenhagen
Department: Centre for language Technology
Web Address: http://cst.ku. dk

Level: PhD
Duties: Research
Specialty Areas: Cognitive Science; Computational Linguistics; Lexicography; Linguistic Theories; Text/Corpus Linguistics


Description:

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 7th Framework Programme (http://clara. uib.no,
http://ec.europa. eu/research/ mariecurieaction s/).

Semantic Annotation of Corpora
One PhD scholarship is announced within the CLARA research area Semantic 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.humaniti es.ku.dk/ research/ phd/announcement s/

Application Deadline: 15-Mar-2010

Web Address for Applications: http://www.humaniti es.ku.dk/ research/ phd/announcement s/

Contact Information:
PhD Bolette Pedersen
bspedersen@hum. ku.dk
Phone:+45 35 32 90 78