PhD Computational Linguistics: Parsing Algorithms for Uncertain Input

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label Burse autorenew 2025-09-29, 17:01 history_edu Ioana Dinescu
Since its foundation in 1614, the University of Groningen has enjoyed an international reputation as a dynamic and innovative center of higher education offering high-quality teaching and research. The Center for Language and Cognition Groningen, CLCG, is a research institute based in the Faculty of Arts with research groups in computational linguistics, syntax and semantics, discourse and communication, and neurolinguistics. It offers a PhD position in the area of computational linguistics.



Job description
Applications are invited for a PhD candidate in the area of computational linguistics. The automated analysis of natural language is an important ingredient for future applications which require the ability to understand natural language. For carefully edited texts current algorithms now obtain good results. However, for user generated content such as tweets and contributions to Internet fora, these methods are not adequate - for a variety of reasons including spelling mistakes, grammatical mistakes, unusual tokenization, partial utterances, interruptions.

The proposed PhD studies a model of language analysis in which the parser provides the analysis of the `intended' utterance, which obviously is closely related to the observed input, but might be slightly different. The relation between the observed sentence and the intended sentence is modelled by a kernel function on input string pairs. The kernel function might model errors such as disfluencies, false starts, word swaps, etc. More concretely, this kernel function can be thought of as a weighted finite-state transducer, mapping an observed input to a weighted finite state automaton representing a probability distribution over possible intended inputs. The parser then is supposed to pick the best parse out of the set of parses of all possible inputs - taking into account the various probabilities.