10 October: fyi -- phd funding, Germany

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PhD position in "Mining Collaboratively Constructed Semantic
Resources": Darmstadt, Germany

The Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing (UKP) Lab
(http://www.ukp.tu-darmstadt.de/) has an opening at the PhD level in
the area of mining collaboratively constructed semantic resources for
NLP. The position is situated within a research project.

Collaboratively constructed knowledge resources, such as Wikipedia or
Wiktionary, have recently given rise to substantial performance
increases in various Natural Language Processing (NLP) applications,
such as information retrieval or text classification. The UKP Lab at
the Technical University of Darmstadt has been among the first research
groups worldwide to explore the use of Wikipedia in NLP. Its most
recent work targets at utilizing the knowledge from a new resource,
Wiktionary, for example in information retrieval. The group has a
strong and internationally competitive research profile in processing
user generated discourse and putting the Socio-Semantic Web to use in
NLP.

The candidate will conduct research in the above outlined area at the
UKP Lab. S/he will interact with senior researchers in the group to
develop new approaches und put them into use in the context of a
complex information search scenario on the Web. One possible research
topic is integrating conventional linguistic wordnets and collaborative
resources, which involves techniques such as word sense disambiguation,
paraphrase recognition, information fusion and corpus-based and
statistical methods.

The UKP Lab is part of the Computer Science Department at the Technical
University of Darmstadt, Germany. The group features a dynamic work
environment, a highly motivated and integrated research team, a
substantial industrial cooperation network, and was distinguished by
several research awards for its fundamental research since its
establishment in summer 2006. The UKP Lab participates in fundamental
as well as applied research projects in information retrieval,
summarization, mining knowledge from unstructured documents and
providing semantically enhanced information management with different
academic and industrial partners.

REQUIREMENTS:

* The applicants should have a strong background in NLP and/or
Computer Science and possess the ability to conduct substantial
research.
* S/he will work towards a PhD in Computer Science from the
Technische Universitaet Darmstadt and should have an excellent degree
in computer science or a related discipline.
* Strong programming skills in Java and a keen research interest
are essential. Experience in e.g. semantic processing, web mining,
information extraction and/or a background in linguistics are definite
assets.
* The ability to effectively cooperate with fellow group members
and the motivation to conduct high-quality research at an international
scale are assumed.

APPLICATION PROCEDURE:

The position is open immediately. Later starting dates can be
negotiated. The applications should include: (i) your CV with details
of past research experience, and (ii) the names of three referees.

Applications should be sent in by October 24th, 2008. The position is
open until filled, so applications arriving after that date may still
be considered, if the position has not yet been filled.

Please direct your inquiries to:
Prof. Dr. Iryna Gurevych
gurevych(at)tk(dot)informatik(dot)tu-darmstadt(dot)de

A hard copy of your application should be sent to:
Prof. Dr. Iryna Gurevych
UKP Lab, FB 20 Computer Science
Technische Universitaet Darmstadt
Hochschulstraße 10, 64289 Darmstadt, Germany

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