Preface

Doctoral students normally write their dissertations in three years. The program begins with an intensive two-semester seminar covering syntax, semantics, and computational methodology for linguistic research, which is followed by two years of doctoral research. Students write yearly reports on their progress and present their work in talks every six months.

Advanced seminars are offered every semester by the three participating institutes.

Dissertations are written either in German, including a 10-page English summary, or in English, including a 10-page German summary. Under certain conditions dissertations can also be written in yet another language, but this requires the approval of the Faculty of Philosophy. The rules and regulations for obtaining a Ph.D. from the University of Stuttgart are spelled out in the Promotionsordnung.

Other features of the Kolleg are:

• Financial support for participation in conferences and summer schools.
• Funding of one post-doc position.
• Klausurtagung: A yearly retreat in a remote location where doctoral students present their research to their peers, their advisors, and invited guests from other universities.
• Colloquium: A lecture series, with lectures by doctoral students or invited speakers every Thursday at 17:30h, followed by dinner with the speaker.

Employment prospects are good for linguists with computational experience: See the job notices on Linguist List.

Funding

Up to 12 doctoral student scholarships and one post-doc scholarship were awarded to the Kolleg by the German Research Foundation (DFG) when the Kolleg's program started in the year 2000. For the third and final phase (2006-2009) 9 new doctoral student scholarships and 1 new post-doc scholarship, as well as the continuation of 3 student scholarships, have been granted by the DFG.

Doctoral student scholarships are usually awarded for a period of two years, with an extension for an additional year, provided that the student's progress is found to be satisfactory. The post-doc stipend is awarded for a period of two years.

New scholarships are awarded as current students leave the Kolleg (cf. the application procedure). Additional information on Graduiertenkollegs, including current stipend levels (which vary depending on marital or family status) can be found on theDFG-web site.

Infrastructure

The Kolleg is located at the Institute of English Linguistics, theInstituts of German Linguistics, the Institute of Linguistik/Romanistik und am Institute of Natural Language Processing. Doctoral students work in shared offices in one of the institutes.

A uniform, sophisticated computational environment is provided for research in linguistics and computational linguistics. This includes:

• a laptop computer for each doctoral student
• audio hardware and speech processing software
• grammar development, parsing, and statistical parsing software
• large text and speech corpora
• lexical and morphological resources and software

Faculty Members and their Research Programs

Dissertations are written under the supervision of a faculty supervisor. The faculty members who are currently available as supervisors, with links to their individual research programs are listed under Faculty Members.