The Institute for Logic,
Language
and Computation
http://www.illc.uva.nl
Summary
- Position:
POSTDOC
researcher
- Duration: 2 years (full time, 38hrs per week)
- Salary (gross per month): minimum
Euro 2379 and maximum Euro 3755 in the first year.
- The Collective Employment Agreement of the Dutch Universities is
applicable.
- Last date for application: February 15, 2009.
Project
Priors for the Estimation of Probabilistic
Grammars from Incomplete
Natural Language Data
VIDI
project
Sima'an [2007-2011]
Abstract: The project aims at exploring the utility of available prior
knowledge
in specifying the model (hypothesis space) and the constraints on the
objective estimation function for unsupervised estimation of
probabilistic grammars for Statistical Machine
Translation and Statistical Parsing.
This project addresses problems of unsupervised estimation in the
face of different kinds of incomplete data (parallel and monolingual
corpora):
- A raw text corpus,
- A partially annotated corpus possibly with negative examples,
and
- A raw in-domain corpus and an out-of-domain annotated corpus.
Corpus annotation is e.g., word-alignment, syntactic or semantic
structure.
Example topics studied within the
project (see project related
publications):
Project team: Markos
Mylonakis, Tejaswini
Deoskar, <postdoc
vacancy> and Khalil Sima'an
(project leader).
Affiliated researchers: Reut Tsarfaty.
External collaborators: Hany Hassan , Barbara Plank and Andy Way.
Requirements
We seek a cooperative
yet independent researcher who is passionate about empirical research, statistical
methods and NLP/CL.
The
following are the main requirements:
- obtained a Ph.D. recently (or
will obtain it in the very near future, in which case testemoney from
the
PhD thesis Supervisor is needed)
- a strong background,
experience in and affinity with the largest subset of the following
areas:
- Computational Linguistics/Natural Language Processing working
with statistical methods
- Machine Learning Applied to NLP with good knowledge of unsupervised statistical methods.
- Statistical Machine Translation.
- Unsupervised statistical methods for statistical Parsing.
The appointment will be
on a temporary basis for a maximum period of 2 years. Based on a
full-time appointment (38 hours per week) the gross monthly salary will
range from € 2379,- to, at the most, € 3755,- , in the
first year depending on expertise and experience.
The Collective Employment Agreement of the Dutch Universities is
applicable.
Application
To Dr Khalil
Sima'an by email (k.simaan@uva.nl with subject heading:
VIDI-POSTDOC).
The following documents (in pdf):
- Letter expressing interest
- Curriculum Vitae
- List of publications (possibly
including a downloadable pdf of your thesis)
- Three letters of reference
sent directly by the referees to Dr Khalil
Sima'an
- Optional: Research plan (1 page)
Last date for application: February 15, 2009.
For inquiries contact
Dr Khalil
Sima'an.
Language
and Computation
Computer Science
University
of Amsterdam
