Ph.D. Student Faculty of Arts - Tilburg University

application deadline : January 14, 2005

Tilburg University is a specialized institute of learning and research, with an emphasis on social sciences and the humanities. It employs more than 1,600 staff and has a student body of around 10,000. There are 19 colleges and research centers, which provide graduate and postgraduate tuition and research of outstanding quality.

Faculty of Arts
In its education and research programme, the Faculty of Arts addresses socially relevant domains in the fields of language, communication, information and literary culture. Important areas of interest are business communication and digital media, discourse studies, language technology and artificial intelligence, multilingualism in a multicultural society, and culture and literature. The Faculty of Arts has an excellent record in evaluations of its research and education.

The Computational Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence research group in the Faculty of Arts and Naturalis, the Dutch National Museum of Natural History are seeking a:

Promovendus (Ph.D. student)
full-time, 4 years
vacancy number 810.04.14

to participate in the research team for the MITCH (Mining Information in Texts from the Cultural Heritage) project, funded within the CATCH (Continuous Access to the Cultural Heritage) programme of NWO (Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research). The MITCH team will be affiliated to Tilburg University and work full-time at the Naturalis research labs in Leiden.

Naturalis is the central institute in the Netherlands for mapping the Earth’s zoological and geological diversity. The questions driving our research and exhibitions are: what do we have now, what was there before and which processes influenced the changes? Observation and identification are crucial to achieve a reliable and consistent picture of biodiversity. The key data on which the theory of the evolution of life on earth was based are enshrined in natural history museums and herbaria. Naturalis manages collections of millions of specimens, ranging from protozoa to dinosaurs, and from minerals to rocks. Naturalis is dedicated to the dissemination of knowledge on the biological and geological diversity and its underlying processes among the general public, as well as to increase public awareness of biodiversity issues.

A lesser known but very valuable treasure of Naturalis, is the collection of logs kept by the many biologists and geologists that travelled on board the Dutch trading ships for centuries. The logs have been created and kept with the same care as the animals and fossils they describe. The value of Naturalis’ collection lies in the combination: the logs are the key to information and knowledge about the collection, which are essential for research in the description and evolution of animal species. The sheer quantity of available log data necessitates the use of technological tools to mine it. The MITCH project aims to do just that: to use techniques from language technology, text mining (information extraction, entity recognition, factoid detection), and data mining / machine learning to convert logs to searchable databases.

Profile
The Ph.D. student is required to have a honours / M.Sc. or M.A.-degree (or equivalent) in computational linguistics or computer science. He/she needs to have a proven knowledge of and experience with text mining applications or data mining / machine learning (please send term papers, theses, or project reports). Programming experience is preferred.

Terms of employment
The collective labour agreement of Tilburg University applies. The selected Ph.D. candidate will get a contract (full-time) as a Ph.D.-student, for one year, which is concluded by an evaluation. Upon a positive outcome of the first-year evaluation the contract will be extended with an additional three years. The full-time Ph.D. position has a gross monthly salary of € 1813,- in the first year, increasing to € 2394,- in the fourth year.

More information
For more information please contact Antal van den Bosch via email Antal.vdnBosch@uvt.nl or phone (+31.13.4663117). Applications should include cover letter, CV, and names of two references, and should be sent before the application deadline of January 14, 2005, by regular mail to Mrs. O. Zweekhorst, Managing Director, Faculty of Arts, Room U 40, Tilburg University, P.O. Box 90153, NL-5000 LE Tilburg, The Netherlands or by email to solliciterenFDL@uvt.nl. In your letter, make reference to the vacancy number.It is the policy of the university to increase the number of women employed. Also members of ethnic minority groups and handicapped people are expressly invited to apply.

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