PhD Studentship: Compositional distributional semantics for question answering (2017)

Today, distributional models of similarity are one of the most important areas of study within NLP. Traditional distributional similarity methods and more recent work on distributed representations of words learnt by neural networks share the view that a word can be represented by a vector which is determined from the contexts in which it is used. Using the distributional hypothesis, it is then often assumed that words which are distributionally similar are also semantically similar i.e., similar in meaning. Applications which make use of knowledge about the similarity of words include speech recognition, parse selection, information retrieval and natural language generation. However, important challenges remain in this area.

This project will aim to address at least one of these, which is how to move from similarity at the word level to similarity at the phrase and sentence level. The student would be expected to contribute to the development and evaluation of syntax-sensitive compositional distributional semantic models for use in the application of Question Answering.

What you get

£14,296 stipend plus a fee waiver at the UK/EU rate.

Type of award

Postgraduate Research

Eligibility

The studentship will include a three year stipend at a standard rate (currently £14,296 per annum) and, in addition, fees at the UK/EU rate. Since the studentship only covers fees at the UK/EU rate, overseas applicants are kindly requested to state in their application how they propose to cover the difference between the UK/EU rate and the overseas fees (for more details visit: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/study/phd/fees-and-scholarships).

Deadline

27 January 2017 23:59

How to apply

Apply for a Informatics PhD for September 2017 using this step by step guide: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/study/phd/apply

In the 'Finance information' section of the application form clearly state you are applying for the "PhD Studentship: Compositional distributional semantics for question answering".

Sponsors

Research webpages: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/informatics/research

Contact us

For informal enquiries about the project contact Dr Julie Weeds, Lecturer in Computer Science: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/profiles/116624

For general enquires contact: phd.informatics@sussex.ac.uk

Timetable

Application Deadline: 27/01/2017

Applicants informed of decision: late March 2017.

Availability

At level(s):
PG (research)

Application deadline:
27 January 2017 23:59 (GMT)
the deadline has now expired