Stage: 2 Traineeship positions at the EC's 'Joint Research Centre' (JRC), Terminology discovery

Fri Mar 14 13:25:08 UTC 2014

Date: Wed, 12 Mar 2014 15:02:53 +0100
From: Ralf Steinberger <ralf.steinberger at jrc.ec.europa.eu>
Message-id: <003801cf3dfb$c36b2ba0$4a4182e0$@jrc.ec.europa.eu>
X-url: http://recruitment.jrc.ec.europa.eu/?type=TR
X-url: http://recruitment.jrc.ec.europa.eu/?type=TR&site=IPR

The European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) is looking to fill
two traineeship positions in the field of:

Terminology discovery over time in the field of disaster risk
management.

If you are interested, please follow the instructions provided at
http://recruitment.jrc.ec.europa.eu/?type=TR
<http://recruitment.jrc.ec.europa.eu/?type=TR&site=IPR> &site=IPR (Code:
2014-IPR-G-000-2974 - ISPRA).

Generic URL: http://recruitment.jrc.ec.europa.eu/?type=TR&site=IPR

Job description:
http://recruitment.jrc.ec.europa.eu/showprj.php?type=T&id=2203

Traineeship rules:
http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/jrc/downloads/jrc_trainee_rules_en.pdf

Conditions/eligibility: http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/jrc/index.cfm?id=5860 

Starting date: around September 2014

Duration: 5 months each

Remuneration: Up to approximately 1000 Euro per month.

The JRC-EMM team: http://ipsc.jrc.ec.europa.eu/?id=179

The EMM applications: http://emm.newsbrief.eu/overview.html

JRC-EMM Publications:
http://langtech.jrc.ec.europa.eu/JRC_Publications.html

DESSCRIPTION OF THE FORESEEN ACTIVITY:

The Europe Media Monitor (EMM) group at the European Commission’s Joint
Research Centre (JRC) in Ispra, Italy, is looking for two trainees to
work on a project to automatically explore the development of
terminology in the field of ‘Disaster Risk Management’ (DRM). The
purpose is to give the international stakeholders in that field
(e.g. the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction UN-ISDR)
concrete and countable evidence of new concepts (terms) emerging in
their field, of changing concepts and of shifts in interest over
time. The study will include both scientific publications and texts
produced by national and international governmental organisations
working in that field.

This first exploratory study will exclusively concern English language
text in the field of Disaster Risk Management, but other languages and
subject areas will be considered in case the outcome of this exploratory
study is deemed concrete and useful. This work may lead to a scientific
publication co-authored by the project contributors.

A scenario to reach this goal of terminology discovery might consist of
the following steps:

(1) Manual or semi-automatic selection and collection of freely
    available documents covering the sub-areas of the life cycle of
    Disaster Risk Management (Prevention and mitigation; Preparedness;
    Response; Recovery and reconstruction);

(2) Conversion of the various file formats (e.g. HTML, PDF, MS-Word)
    into a structured text format (e.g. XML);

(3) Selection of suitable off-the-shelf software for the automatic
    extraction of terms (e.g. noun phrases);

(4) Usage of this software and, if needed, tuning of this software to
    extract lists of potential terms;

(5) Application of statistical methods to select the domain-specific
    terms and to weigh or rank them;

(6) Application of statistical methods that allow to observe trends such
    as the detection of terms that are more frequently or more rarely
    used compared to previous observation periods;

(7) Presentation of the results (term lists, trends) in an
    easy-to-understand manner; This may also include a
    keyword-in-context presentation of the terms, or similar.

The foreseen traineeship duration is five months, starting around 1
September 2014. The working language in the EMM team is English.

REQUIRED QUALIFICATIONS:

The task is foreseen to be carried out jointly by two trainees who, in
combination, possess the skills or satisfy the criteria listed
below. The combination of a more linguistically inclined person and a
programmer could be fruitful.

- Mature student or post-graduate in any of the following fields (or
  similar): computational linguistics, computer science, library
  sciences, machine learning;
- Knowledge of – and experience with – freely available Language
  Technology tools (e.g. for terminology extraction, term weighting,
  categorisation);
- Experience with document format conversion (PDF, HTML, MS-Word etc. to
  text);
- Sufficient programming experience to autonomously implement all
  necessary steps (Java preferred);
- Knowledge of statistical methods for term weighing (e.g. chi-square,
  TF.IDF) and for automatic categorisation;
- Linguistic sensitivity and an interest for terminology extraction
  (what is a term?; relationships between terms); 
- Ability to present the project outcome in a format suitable for DRM
  specialists who may not be so knowledgeable of Information Technology
  (presentation; reporting; visualisation?). 
- Ability to work autonomously;
- Team worker;
- Good working knowledge of English plus the ability to communicate in
  at least one other official EU language.

In your application, please state your interests and please provide
clear information on your skill set, by elaborating on the
above-mentioned list. Should you apply as a ready-made team, please
nevertheless clearly state your personal skills and strengths.

THE JRC TEAM:

The Joint Research Centre (JRC; http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/jrc/) is the
scientific-technical arm of the European Commission. The approximately
2200 JRC employees working in Ispra are from all EU countries and there
are also some non-EU visitors. The working environment is multilingual,
multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary. The JRC’s Europe Media Monitor
(EMM) team (http://ipsc.jrc.ec.europa.eu/?id=179) carries out research
and development in the field of text mining (Language Technology;
Computational Linguistics) for the purposes of media monitoring. EMM
gathers an average of almost 200,000 online news articles per day in
over 70 languages and analyses them to help its large international user
community understand and use this enormous amount of media
information. EMM is publicly accessible via
http://emm.newsbrief.eu/overview.html. The JRC is also known for having
distributed large quantities of parallel linguistic resources
(http://ipsc.jrc.ec.europa.eu/?id=61), including JRC-Acquis, DGT-Acquis,
JRC-Names, the Translation Memories DGT-TM, ECDC-TM and EAC-TM
(http://ipsc.jrc.ec.europa.eu/?id=61), and more.

Ralf Steinberger <http://langtech.jrc.ec.europa.eu/RS.html>  
European Commission - Joint Research Centre (JRC)
21027 Ispra (VA), Italy
URL – Applications:  <http://emm.newsbrief.eu/overview.html> http://emm.newsbrief.eu/overview.html 
URL – Resources: http://ipsc.jrc.ec.europa.eu/index.php?id=61  
URL – Publications: http://langtech.jrc.ec.europa.eu/JRC_Publications.html 

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