Postdoc position in Cardiff (NLP, IR, machine learning)

AUTHORS ASSUME FULL RESPONSIBILITY FOR THEIR MATERIAL.

Job description

Applications are invited for a postdoctoral research associate post in the School of Computer Science & Informatics at Cardiff University. This is a full-time, fixed-term post for 30 months, starting on 1 May 2015 or as soon as possible thereafter. 

The main aim of this project is to learn fine-grained semantic relations from large text corpora. Initially such relations will be obtained in an unsupervised way, by identifying semantic relations with spatial relations between vector-space representations. Subsequently, open-domain, supervised relation extraction methods will be developed which use the output of the unsupervised methods as training data. This research will be part of an ERC funded project on the use of semantic relations between natural language terms in logics for commonsense reasoning. You will work closely with Dr Steven Schockaert. You will possess a PhD in Computer Science or a closely related area, or have equivalent experience.

Closing date for applications: Tuesday 3 February 2015

Essential criteria

- Proven ability to undertake research in a relevant research area (e.g. natural language processing, information retrieval, machine learning) at an international level, as evidenced by research output. 

- Excellent programming skills (java or C/C++). 

- A demonstrable history of contributing to excellent publications in relevant top-tier conferences (e.g. ACL, EMNLP, SIGIR, CIKM, IJCAI, AAAI, ICML) and journals (e.g. Artificial Intelligence, Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, ACM Trans. Information Systems, IEEE Trans. Knowledge and Data  Engineering). 

- Proven ability to communicate specialist ideas clearly in English using written media. 

- Excellent organisational skills with a proven ability to work independently and be self-managing, to prioritise your work and meet deadlines within the framework of an agreed programme. 

- A PhD in Computer Science or closely related area, or equivalent experience.

Desirable criteria

- Knowledge of statistical natural language processing. 

- Knowledge of unsupervised and semi-supervised learning. 

- Knowledge of relation extraction. 

- Experience with analysing large text corpora using a high-performance computing environment. 

- Experience with dimensionality reduction methods such as multi-dimensional scaling, singular-value decomposition, and non-negative matrix factorisation.

More information

For more details about the project and instructions on how to apply, please go to www.cardiff.ac.uk/jobs and search for job 2972BR.