[Corpora-List] PhD position in NLP / ML at Uni Amsterdam (co-funded by a Google award)

[Ivan Titov]

Applications are invited for a PhD position in Natural Language Processing
and Machine Learning at the University of Amsterdam (Institute for Logic,
Language and Computation <http://www.illc.uva.nl/>)


This position is part of a project entitled 'Learning to Reason by
Exploiting Grounded Text Collections', headed by Ivan
Titov<http://people.mmci.uni-saarland.de/~titov/>.
The project is supported by a Google focused research
award<http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2013/07/natural-language-understanding-focused.html>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.


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 related
work on inducing semantic
representations<http://people.mmci.uni-saarland.de/~titov/topics/semantics.html>by
Ivan Titov and the description
of the natural language understanding
program<http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2013/07/natural-language-understanding-focused.html>on
the Google research blog.


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).


Starting date:  1 October 2013 (earlier and later starting dates are
negotiable).


The PhD candidate should have:

   - - 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);
   - - background in machine learning and/or natural language processing
   (desirable), familiarity with nonparametric Bayesian methods is a plus;
   - - strong programming skills;
   - - good academic writing and presentation skills, and fluency in
   English;
   - - good social and organizational skills.


The applications should include:

   - - a curriculum vitae;
   - - a letter of motivation (at most 1 page)  explaining why you are
   interested in this position;
   - - 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;
   - - a list of all university courses taken, including a transcript of
   grades;
   - - a short summary of your Master thesis (at most 2 pages);
   - - 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).


Completed applications should be sent by *15 July 2013* to
application-science at uva.nl, stating your name and vacancy number in the
subject field with a copy (CC) to Ivan Titov <titov at uva.nl> (titov at uva.nl).
 The committee does not guarantee that late or incomplete applications will
be considered.


See the formal announcement<http://www.uva.nl/over-de-uva/werken-bij-de-uva/vacatures/item/13-212.html>for
details. For further information about the vacancy please contact Ivan
Titov (titov at uva.nl).
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://listserv.linguistlist.org/pipermail/corpora/attachments/20130703/79746d57/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
_______________________________________________
UNSUBSCRIBE from this page: http://mailman.uib.no/options/corpora
Corpora mailing list
Corpora at uib.no
http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora