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<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px;font:normal normal normal 12px/normal Arial">Applications are invited for a PhD position in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning at the University of Amsterdam (<a href="http://www.illc.uva.nl/"><span style="text-decoration:underline;color:rgb(31,56,238)">Institute for Logic, Language and Computation</span></a>)</p>
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<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px;font:normal normal normal 12px/normal Arial">This position is part of a project entitled 'Learning to Reason by Exploiting Grounded Text Collections', headed by <a href="http://people.mmci.uni-saarland.de/~titov/"><span style="text-decoration:underline;color:rgb(31,56,238)">Ivan Titov</span></a>. The project is supported by a <a href="http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2013/07/natural-language-understanding-focused.html"><span style="text-decoration:underline;color:rgb(31,56,238)">Google focused research award</span></a> and the University of Amsterdam, and close collaboration with Google is anticipated. Initial funding is for three years, and further funding for a fourth year is expected.</p>
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<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px;font:normal normal normal 12px/normal Arial">The principle goal of the project is to model semantic content of a document specifically to draw inferences about the entities and their relations, explicit or implied, in the text (as needed for question answering or other applications requiring text comprehension). This will be accomplished by learning latent semantic representations, in part, relying on text collections with entities linked to existing knowledge bases such as Freebase, but also on other types of supervision. See recent <a href="http://people.mmci.uni-saarland.de/~titov/topics/semantics.html"><span style="text-decoration:underline;color:rgb(31,56,238)">related work on inducing semantic representations</span></a> by Ivan Titov and the <a href="http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2013/07/natural-language-understanding-focused.html"><span style="text-decoration:underline;color:rgb(31,56,238)">description of the natural language understanding program</span></a> on the Google research blog.</p>
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<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px;font:normal normal normal 12px/normal Arial">The University of Amsterdam provides an excellent environment for research in these areas with world-class faculty in the fields of statistical NLP (incl. Rens Bod, Raquel Fernandez, Christof Monz, Khalil Sima’an, Willem Zuidema), machine learning (e.g., Max Welling) and text mining / IR (e.g., Maarten de Rijke).</p>
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<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px;font:normal normal normal 12px/normal Arial">Starting date: 1 October 2013 (earlier and later starting dates are negotiable).</p>
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<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px;font:normal normal normal 12px/normal Arial">The PhD candidate should have:</p>
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<li style="margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px;font:normal normal normal 12px/normal Arial">- a Master's degree with excellent grades in a relevant field, such as computer science, applied mathematics or computational linguistics (may not be completed yet);</li>
<li style="margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px;font:normal normal normal 12px/normal Arial">- background in machine learning and/or natural language processing (desirable), familiarity with nonparametric Bayesian methods is a plus;</li>
<li style="margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px;font:normal normal normal 12px/normal Arial">- strong programming skills;</li>
<li style="margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px;font:normal normal normal 12px/normal Arial">- good academic writing and presentation skills, and fluency in English;</li>
<li style="margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px;font:normal normal normal 12px/normal Arial">- good social and organizational skills.</li>
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<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px;font:normal normal normal 12px/normal Arial">The applications should include:</p>
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<li style="margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px;font:normal normal normal 12px/normal Arial">- a curriculum vitae;</li>
<li style="margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px;font:normal normal normal 12px/normal Arial">- a letter of motivation (at most 1 page) explaining why you are interested in this position;</li>
<li style="margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px;font:normal normal normal 12px/normal Arial">- a research statement (at most 2 pages), explaining your research interests and how you think they can be related to the topic mentioned in the Job Description above;</li>
<li style="margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px;font:normal normal normal 12px/normal Arial">- a list of all university courses taken, including a transcript of grades;</li>
<li style="margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px;font:normal normal normal 12px/normal Arial">- a short summary of your Master thesis (at most 2 pages);</li>
<li style="margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px;font:normal normal normal 12px/normal Arial">- the name and contact details (including email address) of two – three referees who can provide details about your profile (one of whom should be the main supervisor of your Master thesis).</li>
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<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px;font:normal normal normal 12px/normal Arial">Completed applications should be sent by <b>15 July 2013</b> to <a href="mailto:application-science@uva.nl"><span style="text-decoration:underline;color:rgb(31,56,238)">application-science@uva.nl</span></a>, stating your name and vacancy number in the subject field with a copy (CC) to <a href="mailto:titov@uva.nl"><span style="text-decoration:underline;color:rgb(31,56,238)">Ivan Titov</span></a> (titov at <a href="http://uva.nl">uva.nl</a>). The committee does not guarantee that late or incomplete applications will be considered.</p>
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<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px;font:normal normal normal 12px/normal Arial">See the <a href="http://www.uva.nl/over-de-uva/werken-bij-de-uva/vacatures/item/13-212.html"><span style="text-decoration:underline;color:rgb(31,56,238)">formal announcement</span></a> for details. For further information about the vacancy please contact Ivan Titov (titov at <a href="http://uva.nl">uva.nl</a>).</p>
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