Motivation Letter for Phd at European Universities in Natural Language Processing

I am planning on sending out applications for my PhD, and most require a letter of motivation. Can you please help me with the language/structure, since I have never done this before? Also, is this much enough? Or do I need to write more? How do I sign off on the letter?

Letter of Motivation
Applicant for PhD in Natural Language Processing

I am Rupsa Saha and I am applying for Doctorate in Natural Language Processing. I have been engaged as a Researcher at Tata Consultancy Services for the last two years.

My first experience with NLP was through my Master of Technology at CollegeName, India. Although my research was on Multimodal Brain Tumour Segmentation using Rough Sets, I also contributed to a project for the Indian Navy on translating natural language queries to structured queries.

The two years assured me that not only can I carry out individual research, I enjoy it. While I would not be so bold to consider myself a "good researcher", I am definitely a happy one.

I joined my current company as an NLP researcher immediately on finishing post-graduation, one of two students from the batch of forty-seven to go on to a research position. At present, I work on ontology expansion, supervised learning using sparse data, relationship extraction, and information mining. Most of the data sources are long and short texts from the World Wide Web, across various domains including automobile, finance, crime.

Academic research prepared me to not get frustrated with an umpteenth number of unexpected results. The industrial research experience equips me to present the details of my investigations to be understandable by all. Thanks to organisational support, I have also presented papers and interacted with people internationally at conferences.

NLP and Computational Linguistics offer a vast array of research problems. Some that pique my interest are: relation extraction (especially causal relations), text summarization across multiple sources, devising methods to bootstrap a domain-specific ontology from limited data.

Apart from my (short) research experience, I also bring considerable coding experience in Python/R/Java. Coding has been a passion right from my schooldays

My primary goal in pursuing a PhD at CollegeName is to find myself in an innovative research environment. The guidance of professors at a place like CollegeName would help me grow as a researcher and contribute to the NLP community. Given the diverse nature of the research at the LabName group and my existing skill set, I am confident I can be a productive member.

Rupsa, the only part of this motivational letter version that you wrote which is usable for a 2nd version is the final paragraph that states:

My primary goal in pursuing a PhD at CollegeName is to find myself in an innovative research environment. ... I am confident I can be a productive member.

The motivational letter should indicate the primary goal of your PHD studies. It should explain your current abilities and lack abilities or other research interests that have led you to require yourself to acquire a PhD. More importantly, it should appear to the reviewer that the PhD has an actual career application for yourself. At the moment, you have only explained about what makes you a good candidate for the program, but not what motivated you to increase your academic skills.

The vast majority of the information shared in this essay should be located in your statement of purpose where you should discuss your background and experiences in relation to your purpose for studies. The purpose for your studies are always different from the motivation for your studies. The motivation is what drives you to study while the purpose is the professional goal you hope to achieve with the studies.

Write a new essay based on the closing paragraph. Expand on your discussion about your motivation for an innovative research environment. Don't mention the professors names in the essay unless you know that the professor allows student aides to assist in their research work. Not all professors allow that. By mentioning the professor in this essay, you are indicating a desire to become his assistant, which may not be acceptable depending upon the university or professor requirements. Instead discuss the reasons that led to your choice of university from the curriculum to the type of researcher that you wish to become and how the university can help you develop that aspect of your research skills.

@Holt, Thank you for the pointers, looks like I got the whole idea wrong. Do let me know if the following structure is more appropriate:

par 1 : why i want to study in the college
par 2 : current research work
par 3 : research I would like to carry out
par 4 : college/qualifications that are relevant
par 5 : purpose of my studies (i.e. my existing letter shortened down by a lot)

Also, should i put in why I find the subject fascinating? Or is that too cliched and cheesy?

Yes, you got it right. The motivation letter does not need to be more than 5 paragraphs long. Everything in the letter should only summarize the documentation that you will submitting to the reviewer plus a short version of your statement of purpose. The motivation needs to be based on both academic and professional goals. So the why you want to study in college part needs to represent both, in short form. The long form will be in the statement of purpose. You don't need to fully explain why your college courses are relevant, just that you have the college foundation to complete the course. Everything in short form. Summaries only. No in-depth discussion is required at this point. You are merely introducing your credentials and goals at this point, nothing more.