Graduate Fellowships in Linguistics

Research in computational linguistics at the RuG focuses on the computational analysis of language to further linguistic insight. We expect interested students to pursue research project in close collaboration with ongoing research activities.

A good deal of work is focused on the parsing of Dutch. Alpino is computational analyzer of Dutch which provides accurate parsing of unrestricted text, and which incorporates both knowledge-based and corpus-based techniques. The Alpino parser has been used to analyse very large corpora of Dutch fully automatically. In the past, similar resources of more modest size have been shown to be useful for various applications in information extraction, question answering, lexical acquisition, ontology building and corpus linguistics. We especially welcome research proposals aiming to further exploit such huge syntactically annotated corpora. Relevant url's:

Question Answering for Dutch using Dependency Relations
Algorithms for Linguistic Processing

Another important topic is the application of distance measurements for modeling various phenomena in dialectology and language contact. For instance, phonetic and lexical distance measurements are used to model intelligibility between different but related languages. In dialectology, it has been shown that string edit distance can be a valuable tool for the modeling of gradual changes found between neighboring dialects. Additional factors such as social contact and geography have also been assessed. We also welcome research proposals in the context of distance measurements in phonology and dialectology. Relevant url's:

Informatiekunde: Dialectology
Wilbert Heeringa: Dialectology
Linguistic determinants of mutual intelligibility in Scandinavia