MPhil studentship in the area of Psycholinguistics and Computational Linguistics

[Orasan, Constantin]

[apologies for multiple postings]

MPhil studentship - A study into the use of referring expressions as a
factor influencing the reading comprehension of people with language
disabilities

Closing date - 10th August 2012

The Research Group in Computational Linguistics (http://clg.wlv.ac.uk)
at the University of Wolverhampton invites applications for a University
of Wolverhampton MPhil studentship in the area of Psycholinguistics and
Computational Linguistics, with the option of transfer to PhD dependent
on funding and successful completion of year 1 and 2 studies. This is a
funded bursary which will consist of a stipend towards living expenses
and remission of UK/EU fees. The MPhil candidate will be expected to
carry out research in the area of referring expressions and the overlap
between Psycholinguistics and Computational Linguistics. The study will
exploit natural language processing. This research will extensively
analyse the existing computational and psycholinguistics approaches to
referring expressions and propose a model which brings these two fields
together. It is expected that the study will focus on reading
comprehension by people with language disabilities. This phenomenon (the
use of referring expressions) will be considered in the context of
language disabilities.

The application deadline is 10th August 2012. The starting date of the
studentship is October 2012. 

The successful applicant must have:
- A good honours degree or equivalent in Computational Linguistics,
Psychology, Psycholinguistics, Cognitive Psychology, Statistics,
Psychometry, Social Psychology, Interactive Methods (Quantitative and
Qualitative Research), or closely related areas. 
- Knowledge and understanding of statistical and other quantitative
research.
- Experience in translating scientific literature from English to
Bulgarian.
- Developed skills in writing scientific text.
- Experience in Computational Linguistics / Psychology.

Applications must include:

1)	A curriculum vitae indicating degrees obtained, courses covered,
publications, relevant work experience, and names of two referees that
could be contacted if necessary

2)	A 1-page cover letter with statement of research interests,
indicating why you are interested in this position and why you consider
your experience is relevant. 

3)	An expression of interest form:
http://www.wlv.ac.uk/Docs/grad_sch_exp_of_int.doc

The shortlisted applicants will be interviewed by telephone in the weeks
following the application deadline. The successful applicant will then
be asked to complete a research proposal. 

Established by Prof Mitkov in 1998, the Research Group in Computational
Linguistics delivers cutting-edge research in a number of NLP areas such
as anaphora resolution, automatic summarisation, question answering,
multilingual text processing, multiple-choice question generation and
text simplification. The results from the latest 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 ranked joint 3rd with 2 more universities in the
Unit of Assessment “Linguistics”. According to the league tables of the
Guardian, The Times and Research Fortnight, research in Linguistics at
the University of Wolverhampton in one of the top 6 in the UK. 

Informal enquiries and electronic applications can be sent to by email
to: 

Mrs Erin Stokes
Research Administrator
Research Institute of Information and Language Processing
University of Wolverhampton
Stafford St. 
Wolverhampton
WV1 1SB
United Kingdom
Email: erin.stokes at wlv.ac.uk 

-- 
Dr. Constantin Orasan <C.Orasan at wlv.ac.uk>
Senior Lecturer in Computational Linguistics
Deputy Head of the Research Group in Computational Linguistics
Research Group in Computational Linguistics
http://www.wlv.ac.uk/~in6093/
University of Wolverhampton