Level: PhD
Specialty Areas: Computational Linguistics; WSD
Language Documentation
Psycholinguistics
Description:
The Division of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies (LMS) at NTU invites applications for three PhD Studentships, funded by the college of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.
LMS has a focus on the study of the languages of multilingual individuals and of multilingual societies. Research in the division is geared towards a deepening of our understanding of multilingualism through empirical studies of topics such as language description and documentation, language contact, loanword phonology, machine translation, language maintenance, and multilingual language processing and acquisition.
Language documentation:
Suitably qualified people are invited to apply to undertake research on a hitherto undescribed (or scantily described) Tibeto-Burman, Austro-Asiatic or Indic language of the north-east India/Burma region, leading to a comprehensive grammatical description of that language. This project forms part of a larger initiative to document the languages of north-east India and adjacent regions of Asia.
The ideal applicant will have a solid grounding in descriptive linguistics and already hold an MA, or a BA with a good Honours grade. Successful applicants can anticipate doing one year of coursework, followed by three years of empirically-based research. After completion of the coursework year, the candidate will undertake a 9-12 month period of fieldwork that will involve living in the speech community to record, transcribe and analyse linguistic data. S/he will then return to Singapore to complete the first draft of the grammar and prepare the corpus of materials for archiving. A second trip of 3 months will be made in the final year to check the analysis of the data.
Interested applicants should contact Dr Alexander Coupe (arcoupe at ntu.edu.sg) to discuss a possible project.
Psycholinguistics :
Suitably qualified people are invited to apply to undertake research on bilingual sentence processing using ERP or behavioral methods.
Interested applicants should contact Dr Nayoung Kwon (nayoung at ntu.edu.sg) to discuss a possible project.
Computational Linguistics:
Suitably qualified people are invited to apply to undertake research on constraining meaning using aligned texts. This is part of research on developing a detailed multilingual analysis of structure and meaning using parallel texts in Chinese, English and Japanese. Structural analysis primarily uses head driven phrase structure grammars (in cooperation with the Deep Linguistic Processing using HPSG Initiative). Semantic analysis use WordNets for all three languages. The research aims to improve both computational modeling of meaning and techniques for word sense disambiguation.
Interested applicants should contact Dr Francis Bond (bond at ieee.org) to discuss a possible project.
General Description:
* The award is for up to four years (subject to good progress).
* The monthly stipends for Ph.D students will be S$2,300 for Singapore Citizens, S$2,200 for Singapore Permanent Residents and S$2,000 for international students.
* For students who pass the Ph.D. Qualifying Examination/Confirmation, the stipend may be increased to S$2,800 for Singapore Citizens, S$2,700 for Singapore Permanent Residents S$2,500 for international students, subject to good performance in research and the attainment of required standards for courses taken.
* In addition to the monthly stipend, the award also covers the annual tuition fee and the annual computer fee.
* NTU will normally help you find accommodation on campus.
For more details see: http://admissions.ntu.edu.sg/graduate/scholarships/Pages/ResearchScholarship.aspx
-- Francis Bond <http://www3.ntu.edu.sg/home/fcbond/> Division of Linguistics and Multilingual Studies Nanyang Technological University