PhD position in Data-Driven Computational Semantics and Geographic Information Systems (1.0 FTE)

The Utrecht Institute of Linguistics (UiL OTS) invites applications for a PhD position in data-driven computational semantics. The project will use large corpora and machine learning methods to acquire meanings of spatially-based concepts, which will be used as part of a natural language interface to Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The project will enrich an initial model of spatial meanings (Kracht 2002, Mani & Pustejovsky 2012, Zwarts & Winter 2000) with a selected set of semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic parameters. To train this model, the project will acquire a large dataset of language use with spatial language, including ordinary texts and expert interactions with GIS. These data will be employed for training and evaluating the initial model. This novel combination of semantic representation, data-driven learning and evaluation against a real-life problem is expected to substantially advance the ability of users to interact with geographic databases.

The project will be supervised by Dr. Tejaswini Deoskar and Prof. Yoad Winter, in collaboration with Dr. Joost Zwarts and NLP researchers from the Language and Computation group at the ILLC, University of Amsterdam (Prof. Khalil Sima'an, Dr. Jelle Zuidema). The empirical study of elicited user data will be carried out in collaboration with Prof. James Hampton (Psychology, City, University of London). Work at the UiL OTS will be part of the ROCKY project, financed by an ERC Advanced grant to Prof. Yoad Winter.

Tasks

Tasks for the PhD candidate will include:

completion and defence of a PhD thesis within four years; regular presentation of intermediate research results at workshops and conferences; publication of peer-reviewed articles in established international journals or conference proceedings; help with organizational tasks connected to the project, such as the organization of conferences and workshops; participation in training programmes and expert meetings scheduled for the project; participation in selected training programmes scheduled for the Research Institute, Graduate School and the National Research School.

References

Kracht, M., 2002. On the semantics of locatives. Linguistics and Philosophy, 25(2), pp.157-232.
Mani, I. and Pustejovsky, J., 2012. Interpreting motion: Grounded representations for spatial language. Oxford U.P.
Zwarts, J. and Winter, Y., 2000. Vector space semantics: A model-theoretic analysis of locative prepositions. Journal of logic, language and information, 9(2), pp.169-211.