SCHOOL OF COGNITIVE AND COMPUTING SCIENCES
1 Research Assistant position and 1 EPSRC PhD Studentship
One research assistant position and one PhD studentship are available on a
3-year EPSRC-funded project entitled `PSET: Practical Simplification of
English Text'. The goal is to build a computer system which takes in
English newspaper text across the WWW, and outputs a simplified version
with broadly similar meaning (with, for example, uncommon or unusual words
replaced with more common or familiar synonyms, and difficult to follow
syntactic constructs replaced with simpler ones); the system will be
targeted at people suffering from aphasia which impairs their
comprehension of written English. The component of the research at Sussex
involves further development of an existing robust statistical parsing
system. The project is in collaboration with researchers at the University
of Sunderland.
Applicants for the research assistant position should have research
experience in natural language processing, with knowledge of statistical
and/or unification/constraint-based computational linguistics, and should
be familiar with UNIX and C. Ability to program in Lisp and experience of
MacOS are also desirable. The salary will be on the Research 1B or 1A
Scale (#15,159-22,785 pa), depending on age and experience.
The project studentship will involve research into applying efficient
finite-state processing techniques to syntactic parsing of natural
language. Applicants for this studentship should be UK or EU residents,
and have a good first degree (2.1 or 1st) or postgraduate qualification in
computer science. The studentship covers tuition fees, and the student
will receive the standard EPSRC maintenance grant (#5,295 for the 1997/8
academic year) plus a supplement of #350 per year.
The project will start on or soon after August 1, 1997. The grant includes
provision for attendance at relevant workshops and conferences. See
<http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/lab/nlp/carroll/carroll.html> for further
details. Interested candidates should send a CV as soon as possible to:
Dr John Carroll, Cognitive and Computing Sciences, University of Sussex,
Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QH, UK. E-Mail: john.carroll@cogs.susx.ac.uk; Fax:
(+44 / 0)1273 671320