Junior researcher – Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KU Leuven), Belgium
The Language Intelligence & Information Retrieval (LIIR) group (http://www.cs.kuleuven.be/groups/liir/, Department of Computer Science, Human Computer Interaction section) at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (KU Leuven), Belgium has an open position for a
Junior researcher
(Full time, 4 years)
In the field of
machine reading, natural language processing and machine learning,
leading to a PhD in Engineering, Computer Science.
The PhD fellowship is sponsored by the project SAEL-RMR (A Synergetic Approach to Extraction, Learning and Reasoning for Machine Reading – G.0356.12), in which LIIR collaborates with the artificial intelligence group of KU Leuven and the Web intelligence group of Ghent University (Belgium), and by the European project (Machine Understanding for Interactive StorytElling – EU FP7-296703 – http://www.muse-project.eu/), in which LIIR collaborates with famous European groups with regard to knowledge management, storytelling, cognitive science and processing of medical texts.
The goal of the PhD research is to perform research in an area known as machine reading, i.e., automatically extracting knowledge from text. More specifically, the focus is on algorithms that use natural language processing techniques for reading the textual information and to design inferencing techniques that reason over uncertain evidences in order to improve the accuracy of the knowledge acquisition. The developed technologies will be evaluated on biomedical texts.
The successful applicant has:
• Completed the master degree with success (cum laude) as evidenced by excellent grades and possible publications;
• A master degree in computer science, electrical engineering, mathematics, physics or a related discipline;
• Acquired knowledge and practical experience in machine learning, data mining and information retrieval; knowledge of optimization methods, language modeling, structured input and output spaces, graphical models, probabilistic inference, message-passing algorithms and related techniques is an advantage;
• Good programming skills (e.g., Java, C++, MATLAB, Python);
• Excellent English language skills (written and spoken);
• Good communication skills;
• The capability to work independently and in a team;
• A profound interest in machine understanding of text.
Please submit your application, cv and grade transcripts in electronic form to Prof. Marie-Francine Moens (sien.moens@cs.kuleuven.be). The starting date is of the PhD position January 1, 2013. We are accepting applications until November 15, 2012, or until the position fills.
