Employer: The Open University
Level: PhD
Scholarship Description: With the explosion of people’s attitudes and opinions expressed in social media including blogs, discussion forums, tweets, etc, detecting sentiment or opinion from the Web is becoming an increasingly popular way of interpreting data. Sentiment analysis is concerned with automatically identifying sentiment or opinion expressed in a given piece of text. It finds wide applications in tracking companies’ reputations, finding customers’ opinions about products/services and competitors, monitoring positive or negative trends in social media, etc.
This studentship is funded by both the Open University and an EU project that involves several academic and industrial partners from various European countries. The aim of this project is to design and develop a platform for real-time monitoring and analysis of business online communities.
Project: This PhD project aims to use semantic technologies to develop novel techniques for topic/sentiment extraction and monitoring from blogs, forums, and other social media using techniques from machine learning, natural language processing, information retrieval, data mining, and semantic web. In particular, it will focus on detecting, tracking and qualitatively measuring topic ebb and flow, providing views of current and recurrent interests and shifts in topic and sentiment. This project will also identify community roles such as topic innovators, summarisers, answer-givers or the content of topics likely to engender disputes.
Academic Requirements: You should have a first or upper second-class honours undergraduate degree or a relevant Masters Degree or equivalent experience in a relevant computer science discipline. Knowledge of natural language processing or machine learning would be desirable.
Scholarship Application Deadline: 08/11/2010
Further Scholarship Information and Application:
http://www3.open.ac.uk/employment/job-details.asp?id=5358
