SUBJECT: [ &NAME ] &NAME Studentships at &NAME UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX DEPARTMENT OF INFORMATICS &NAME &NAME Available &NUM 3-year PhD studentship are available starting on or around &NUM October &NUM associated with the following &NUM &NAME EPSRC-funded projects . COGENT : Controlled Generation of &NAME ' , Natural Language Generation ( &NAME ) technology has reached a level of maturity where applied systems exist in a range of specialised real-world domains ( such as weather bulletins , software documentation , health and legal advice and stock market movements ) . However , developing such systems currently involves hand-crafting and special-purpose tuning by &NAME experts which is non-portable , non-scaleable , time-consuming and expensive . Wider deployment of language generation requires more generally applicable and reusable &NAME components based on wide-coverage grammars ; however , at present effective techniques for such wide-coverage generation are not well understood . The COGENT project will investigate systematically the characteristics of wide-coverage generation and to develop techniques for controlling it effectively . As well as furthering our understanding of wide-coverage generation , the project aims to deliver a substantial and novel resource to support future research in this area , and practical implementations of wide-coverage controllable generators . The project is in collaboration with &NAME , University of &NAME . Natural Language Service Composition The pervasive computing environment of the future will provide a wide variety of services within the network . The value of such services will be greatly enhanced if we are able to tailor our computing environment by composing services . For example you might want to arrange for your heating to be turned off when your calendar indicates that you will be out of your house for more than a day . This project investigates how &NAME techniques can help make service composition a possibility for non-technical users . Services , such as heating systems and personal calendars , advertise themselves to a service directory that will develop an ontology of services . This can be exploited to constrain the discourse domain in which users describe new features . The interface will guide the user to an unambiguous expression of the new feature that can be mapped onto a standard component architecture of services . These studentships would be suitable for people interested in carrying out research into areas such as * statistical &NAME * applied natural language semantics , * lexical acquisition for practical language processing systems or * the association of linguistic knowledge with ontologies Applicants for these studentships should have a good first degree and / or postgraduate qualification in computer science , computer processing of language , or similar . The studentships covers tuition fees for &NAME nationals ; the projects also pay a ( tax-free ) stipend starting at &NAME &NUM a year . The grants include funds for attendance at relevant workshops and conferences . See ( &WEBSITE language processing work at the University of &NAME . Interested candidates should email their &NAME ( as plain text , postscript , or pdf ) as soon as possible to : Dr &NAME &NAME , e-mail : &EMAIL .