PhD Studentship in Natural Language Generation

The Research Group in Computational Linguistics, Synalp/LORIA in Nancy (France) invites applications for a three-year-funded PhD studentship in Computational Linguistics.

There is a growing need in the semantic web (SW) community for technologies that give humans easy access to the machine-oriented Web of data. Because it maps data to text, Natural Language Generation (NLG) provides a natural mean for presenting this data in an organized, coherent and accessible way. Conversely, the representation languages used by the semantic web (e.g., OWL ontologies and RDF data) are a natural starting ground for NLG systems. The aim of the PhD thesis will be to explore the interaction between the semantic web, the textual web and Natural Language Generation (NLG). More precisely, the goal will be to develop generic weakly supervised methods for generating text from semantic web data in particular, content selection and verbalisation methods.

The project will build on an ongoing collaboration between LORIA (Nancy, France), the KRDB group at (Bolzano, Italy) and Stanford Research International (USA), bringing together high level academic partners with internationally recognised expertise in both NLG (LORIA) and knowledge processing (KRDB, SRI).

Deadline: open until filled. For more information, see http://www.loria.fr/~gardent/phdtopic.html