29 November: FYI -- PhD funding (San Sebastian, Spain)
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IXA NLP Group (http://ixa.eus/)
Computer Science Faculty.
University of the Basque Country, San Sebastian.
The IXA group invites applications for two PhD studentships starting October
2018, for a period of three to four years.
The PhD positions are funded by the Spanish government in a competitive
call. We are ready to host and supervise the candidate, and to assist
with the PhD project and application procedure. The studentships cover
tuition fees and an stipend of 16.422€ per year (1.173€ in 14 monthly
payments)
Some possible topics for the PhD are the following:
- Machine Translation. Applying Unsupervised Machine Translation to
improve MT with scarce resources in specific domains and specific
language pairs.
- Knowledge Acquisition. Learning by Interacting with Humans: Use
previous dialogue experiences to train the domain and dialogue
management modules of chatbots, based on deep learning techniques,
with applications to community question answering.
- Multilingual Text Acquisition. Automatic development of semantic
processors leveraging parallel data: (i) using word alignments
traditionally used in MT (ii) using continuous word representations.
- Vision and Language. Multimodal representations for richer semantic
interpretations: using grounded multimodal representation for word and
sentences that combine textual and visual features to acquire
background knowledge information
- Deep learning for NLP. Deep learning architectures to model Natural
Language Inference (NLI and STS datasets), with applications to
community question answering.
- Deep learning for NLP. Learning by interacting with humans: Use
previous dialogue experiences to train the domain and dialogue
management modules of chatbots, based on deep learning techniques,
with applications to community question answering.
- Domain Adaptation: Explore automatic techniques to improve the
performance of NLP tools in legal and medical domains, with emphasis
on information extraction
- Discourse and Pragmatics: Coreference and Opinion Mining. / Event
identification. /Discourse Structure and Summarization.
The procedure is roughly the following:
- Send an e-mail to including a CV by 5th of December
(see details below).
- Applicant should be available for an interview by skype or similar if
needed.
- Selected candidates will apply for the Spanish government funds (FPU
grants) around the end of December.
The CV should include degrees and grades (very important), names of two
references and a brief motivation letter stating your research interests
and past experience. All documents should be sent as a single PDF.
The approximate schedule would be the following:
- The Spanish government publishes a first round of selection by the end
of March.
- The candidates will agree with the supervisor a specific PhD project
by the end of May.
- The Spanish government publishes their decision by the end of
July.
- Finally, the PhD would start in October.
Requirements
************
240 ECTS already completed with excellent grades in a computer
science-related degree.
Additional 60 ECTS e.g. in a master degree to be completed by September
2018 at the latest.
Experience in NLP and deep learning preferred. Excellent programming and
mathematical skills preferred. Fluent English
Please see URL for the details about the Spanish Government call:
(http://www.mecd.gob.es/servicios-al-ciudadano-mecd/catalogo/educacion/estudiantes/becas-ayudas/para-estudiar/universidad/doctorado/fpu.html)
Additional Information
**********************
- About IXA Research Group (http://ixa.eus/)
IXA is a research group working, on the natural language processing at
the University of the Basque Country , It is a multidisciplinary group
composed of 42 computer scientists and 12 linguists. We work together
on algorithms, tools and linguistic resources that allow computers to
process and understand human languages. Our work ranges from basic
research in computational linguistics to key applications in human
language technology, and covers areas such as Information Retrieval and
Information Extraction, Machine Translation, Language learning,
Morphology, Syntax-Morphosyntax, Lexicography-Semantics, Basic
facilities and Integrations of Language Tools (XML).
- About the University of the Basque Country
(https://www.ehu.eus/en/web/guest/en-home)
In a prosperous region stretching along the Atlantic coast of northern
Spain, the people of the Basque Country are the custodians of one of
Europe's most ancient languages and cultures. Yet, they not only have a
high esteem for tradition, but are also remarkably forward-looking and
have established a highly regarded industrial sector.
The region's success and scientific and technological progress are
underpinned by the University of the Basque Country, a vibrant
30-year-old institution with 45,000 students, 5,000 world-class academic
staff and state-of-the-art facilities. Following our motto 'Give and
spread knowledge', the University of the Basque Country is an
integrating institution willing to produce knowledge, experience and
research in order to forward them to the general public. Our courses
catalogue consists of 67 Bachelor´s Degrees in all fields of
knowledge. At postgraduate level, we offer 103 official master
programmes, 44 professional & expert diplomas and 71 PhD programmes.
The University of the Basque Country wishes to host an unrestricted and
multicultural community. Our International Relations Office manages over
900 exchange agreements with other Spanish, European and International
universities. Every year, our three campuses turn into lively melting
pots where over 900 foreign students blend in with our local
trainees. We take part in SICUE, the Spanish universities students´
exchange programme; ERASMUS, the most extended European mobility
programme; and we furthermore have created our own exchange programmes
with Latin-America (UPV/EHU-AMÉRICA LATINA) and other destinations (the
USA, Canada, The Philipine Islands, New Zealand, Russia).
- About San Sebastian (https://www.sansebastianturismo.com/en/)
San Sebastián is a resort town on the Bay of Biscay in Spain’s
mountainous Basque Country. It’s known for Playa de la Concha and Playa
de Ondarreta, beaches framed by a picturesque bayfront promenade, and
world-renowned restaurants helmed by innovative chefs. In its
cobblestoned old town (Parte Vieja), upscale shops neighbor vibrant
pintxo bars pairing local wines with bite-size regional specialties.
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