A 3 year PhD studentship on computing veracity of social media content

-----------Apologies for cross-posting----------------------------

Applications are invited for a fully funded PhD studentship on computing 
veracity of social media content.

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 
<http://www.findaphd.com/common/clickCount.aspx?theid=35209&type=75&url=http%3a%2f%2fgate.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.

For further information please contact Dr Kalina Bontcheva 
(K.Bontcheva@dcs.shef.ac.uk 
<http://www.FindAPhD.com/search/EmailEnquiry.aspx?fapjid=35209&LID=1772&EA=K.Bontcheva@dcs.shef.ac.uk>). 


Applicants should apply using the online application form at:
http://www.shef.ac.uk/postgraduate/research/apply 
<http://www.findaphd.com/common/clickCount.aspx?theid=35209&type=75&url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.shef.ac.uk%2fpostgraduate%2fresearch%2fapply> 


Dr Kalina Bontcheva's homepage http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~kalina 
<http://www.findaphd.com/common/clickCount.aspx?theid=35209&type=75&url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.dcs.shef.ac.uk%2f%7ekalina> 

GATE project page http://gate.ac.uk 
<http://www.findaphd.com/common/clickCount.aspx?theid=35209&type=75&url=http%3a%2f%2fgate.ac.uk> 

NLP research group http://nlp.shef.ac.uk/ 
<http://www.findaphd.com/common/clickCount.aspx?theid=35209&type=75&url=http%3a%2f%2fnlp.shef.ac.uk%2f> 



      Funding Notes:


The grant will cover all study fees for EU and UK nationals and a living 
stipend for three years. The stipend will provide £13,796 p.a. plus a 
travel fund for attending collaborative meetings and international 
conferences. Non-EU citizens can apply but the bursary will not cover 
the additional non-EU tuition fees (about £9,000 a year).