The Institute for Logic, Language and Computation <http://www.illc.uva.nl> at the University of Amsterdam <http://www.uva.nl> has a vacancy for a *
Postdoctoral Researcher
1.0 fte (38h per week)
For both internal and external candidates
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.
<http://staff.science.uva.nl/%7Esimaan/postdoc_adv.html> 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):
1. A raw text corpus,
2. A partially annotated corpus possibly with negative examples, and
3. 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 <http://staff.science.uva.nl/%7Esimaan/VIDI_project/Pubs_VIDI.html>):
* Statistical machine translation with hierarchical/syntactic
structure, e.g., statistical estimation [Mylonakis and Sima'an
2007 and 2008], lexical syntactic structrure [Hassan, Way and
Sima'an 2007 and 2008]
<http://staff.science.uva.nl/%7Esimaan/VIDI_project/Pubs_VIDI.html>
* Statistical machine translation with morphological structure --
Work in progress 2009,
* Inducing hidden compositional structure for machine translation
(possibly using syntactic structure) -- Work in progress 2009.
For more detail see: Webpage <http://staff.science.uva.nl/%7Esimaan/postdoc_adv.html>
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:
1. Computational Linguistics/Natural Language Processing working with
statistical methods
2. Machine Learning Applied to NLP with good knowledge of
unsupervised statistical methods.
3. Statistical Machine Translation.
4. Unsupervised statistical methods for statistical Parsing.
Appointment
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 <mailto:simaan at science.uva.nl?SUBJECT=VIDI-POSTDOC> by email (k.simaan at uva.nl with subject heading: VIDI-POSTDOC). Send the following documents (all in pdf):
1. Letter expressing interest in this vacancy
2. Curriculum Vitae
3. List of publications
4. Three letters of reference sent directly by the referees to Dr
Khalil Sima'an <mailto:simaan at science.uva.nl?SUBJECT=VIDI-POSTDOC>
5. Optional: Research plan (1 page)
Last date for application: February 15, 2009.
For inquiries contact
Dr Khalil Sima'an <mailto:simaan at science.uva.nl?SUBJECT=VIDI-POSTDOC>. Language and Computation <http://www.illc.uva.nl/Research/research06b.php> Computer Science <http://www.science.uva.nl/english/home.cfm> University of Amsterdam <http://www.uva.nl/>
-- -------------- Khalil Sima'an
Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) University of Amsterdam Tel#: +31-20-525 6573 Fax#: +31-20-525 5206 http://staff.science.uva.nl/~simaan
Address: Plantage Muidergracht 24 1018 TV Amsterdam The Netherlands