Large-Scale Annotation and Alignment of Parallel Corpora for the Investigation of Linguistic Variation
The English Department and the Institute of Computational Linguistics at the University of Zurich are looking for two PhD students to work in the project 'Large-Scale Annotation and Alignment of Parallel Corpora for the Investigation of Linguistic Variation'. The project aims at annotating and aligning multi-lingual parallel corpora (English, German, French, Spanish, Russian and Finnish), which will be used to study variable article use in English and German. Funding is available for a period of three years and may be extended.
Qualifications
(a) English Linguistics PhD position
- Master in English Linguistics
- previous experience with corpus linguistics and statistics
- Languages: excellent English skills, good German skills; ideally, also basic skills in one of the other languages
(b) Computational Linguistics PhD position
- Master or Diploma in Computational Linguistics or related field
- Strong programming skills
- Languages: good English and German skills; other languages are a plus
Tasks
(a) English Linguistics
- develop a methodology to retrieve information on variable article use (including zero articles) for English and German from the parallel corpora
- multi-factorial modelling of variable article use in English and German (zero articles in English, in particular)
- evaluate the usefulness of the corpus-driven approach to the modelling of cross-linguistically relevant notions such as ’definiteness’ (extend to typologically different language pairs)
(b) Computational Linguistics
- develop word-aligned and annotated parallel corpora for the language pairs English-German, English-French, English-Spanish (at a later stage: English-Russian and English-Finnish)
- develop a corpus query system for the investigation of large aligned and annotated parallel corpora
Benefits
- Salary according to the Swiss National Science Foundation rates (i.e. 42,000 CHF - 48,000 CHF per annum)
- Support for conference and summer school attendance
- Small and enthusiastic team
- High standard of living in one of the most attractive European cities: Zurich
Application
Applications (including a CV and academic record) should be sent to
- English Linguistics: Prof. Dr. Marianne Hundt (mhundt AT es.uzh.ch)
- Computational Linguistics: Prof. Dr. Martin Volk (volk AT cl.uzh.ch)
Application Deadline: 31 May 2013
Proposed starting date: 1 August 2013