Funded PhD Research Studentship, Natural Language Processing, University of Sheffield, UK

Computing Veracity of Social Media Healthcare Content

University of Sheffield - Department of Computer Science

Natural Language Processing Group

3-year studentship

The NLP group at the University of Sheffield is inviting applications for a fully funded PhD studentship on computing veracity of social media content.

Application closing date is 31 May 2013.

The aim of this studentship is to design natural language processing methods to compute veracity of social media content and deal with the specifics of medical language. The goal is to model, identify, and verify healthcare-related misinformation and disinformation, as they spread across online media (e.g. patient forums) and social networks. Natural language processing (NLP) now provides many indispensable tools for working with large unstructured text collections, allowing effective search, information extraction and translation. Social media content poses a number of difficult and interesting NLP research challenges. The studentship will also involve a close collaboration with healthcare researchers from a large NHS trust and opportunities for working with natural language processing of clinical records.

The PhD studentship will be associated to a larger research project about developing novel cross-disciplinary social semantic methods, combining document semantics, a priori large-scale world knowledge (e.g. Linked Open Data) and a posteriori knowledge and context from social networks, past user behaviour, and spatio-temporal metadata. The research will also involve use of and further development of GATE (http://gate.ac.uk), which is a leading open-source NLP toolkit, developed by an established team of 12 researchers.

Candidates should have a First Class Honours or a good 2.1 degree in Computer Science and have excellent computer programming skills. Experience with natural language processing and machine learning techniques is essential, and detailed knowledge of biomedical NLP, medical ontologies, and Linked Open Data are highly desirable. A background in linguistics and/or fluency in multiple languages would also be desirable, but is not strictly necessary.

The grant will cover all study fees for EU and UK nationals and a living stipend for three years plus a travel fund for attending collaborative meetings and international conferences.

For further information please contact Dr Kalina Bontcheva (K.Bontcheva@dcs.shef.ac.uk).

-- 

Leon R A Derczynski
Research Associate, NLP Group

Department of Computer Science
University of Sheffield
Regent Court, 211 Portobello
Sheffield S1 4DP, UK

+45 5157 4948
http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~leon/