Information for Prospective Students

If you are a prospective student, I'm grateful that you are reading this before sending me email. Probably the first thing you should do is read my research blurb to see if your research goals are allied with mine.

Although I try my best to respond to the email I get from prospective students, due the large volume of email I cannot always respond to every email individually. This is why I have created this web page to try to answer the typical questions you might have about joining my research lab and admission to graduate study in computer science at SFU.

After reading this web page, please do contact me if your questions were not answered. But if you send me email, please add the code: X.TcyM6CTZ to the subject line of your email, e.g. Subject: Graduate research position in NLP at SFU? (X.TcyM6CTZ). This will tell me you have read this page, and I will make an extra effort to respond to your email. Please do not send email with attachments (send a URL instead).

SFU Natural Language Lab: open positions

• If you are considering SFU's graduate program as a MS or PhD student, I strongly encourage you to apply. We have an excellent research lab in computational linguistics and natural language processing. We are certainly very competitive with other universities in Canada.
  
  
• About open lab positions: we usually have at least 1-2 open positions every year for Masters students. As for open Phd positions we can only make an estimate in Apr/May, around the time when you apply for admission to the Fall semester at SFU. Typically we have at least one open Ph.D. position in our lab per year, and we require a strong background in NLP and/or machine learning for a Ph.D. candidate.
  
  
• About post-doc positions: please send me email with the subject, Postdoc position in NLP at SFU? (X.TcyM6CTZ).

Graduate Admissions at SFU

• Note that I don't make admission decisions. They are made by the admissions committee in the Computing Science department. Please apply directly to the university and the department (follow directions on our Graduate Admissions page) and please contact them about admission decisions and procedures.
  
  
• This also means that I cannot assess your application and tell you if you would be admitted (since I do not make this decision). Please do not send me your CV or Statement of Purpose and ask for advice on admissions -- the Graduate Program Committee has an email address for such inquiries.
  
  
• The current SFU CS Grad Admission application form requires you to provide a potential supervisor. You do not need my permission to select my name as a potential supervisor.
  
  
• If you are a prospective graduate student who has already applied to SFU for graduate studies and you have some prior background in natural language processing or computational linguistics (papers, projects, courses etc.) then send me a brief email in plain text about yourself, your research interests and so on. Please do not send any attachments with your email. Send a URL to your publications instead of the file. Don't forget to add the magic number above to your email subject line.
  
  
• If you've received an offer of admission from the SFU CS department to the CS PhD program and you have indicated clearly in your Statement of Purpose that you want to work in NLP, then I probably already know who you are. I will contact you directly if I am interested in offering you a position in our research group. If you don't hear from me and its been more than 4 weeks since you received your admission offer, please send me a brief email in plain text.

Summer Internships for Undergraduates

• All summer interns should apply through the MITACS Globalink program. Make sure you indicate that you wish to work with the SFU Natural Language Lab. Unfortunately, at this time, our research lab is unable to hire any summer interns directly.

For SFU students

• If you're in the undergraduate or Masters program at SFU, and you are interested in working with me, please come and talk to me. Set up a meeting after you look up my schedule from my home page.
  
  
• If you are an undergraduate student take the undergraduate NLP course (CMPT-413: Computational Linguistics) when I teach this course, and if you are a Masters student take the graduate level NLP course (CMPT 825: Natural Language Processing). Both courses are usually offered every year.
  
  
• Also feel free to meet me to talk about NLP or to attend our weekly lab meetings.

For students interested in Bioinformatics

• If you are interested in research into bioinformatics, please note that I will not be accepting any new Masters or PhD students interested purely in bioinformatics at this time.
  
  
• I am only interested in research into biological sequence analysis that will be in addition to those models being used in natural language, so if you are not interested in natural language, I'm not the person for you.

More Information

For further information about my research, and research into NLP at SFU, the following links might be useful:

• The SFU Natural Language Lab
• List of my research publications