Connectionists: Two PhD positions in deep learning for Natural Language Understanding at Idiap (Switzerland)

[James Henderson]

The Idiap Research Institute seeks qualified candidates for two PhD 
student position in the field of natural language understanding, 
developing deep learning methods for textual entailment and opinion 
summarisation.

The research will be conducted in the framework of the Swiss NSF funded 
project Learning Representations of Abstraction for Opinion 
Summarisation.  One of the successful candidates will investigate 
modelling abstraction relationships between texts (textual entailment), 
and the other will investigate summarising large collections of opinions 
(opinion summarisation).  Opinion summarisation must abstract away from 
the details of individual opinions to find consensus statements which 
are entailed by a significant proportion of opinions.

This project will model these natural language understanding tasks 
through fundamental advances in representation learning and deep 
learning architectures.  The work will start from Dr. Henderson's work 
on modelling abstraction in deep learning architectures, where learned 
vectors represent entailment rather than the usual similarity.  
Successes in the unsupervised learning of word vectors for entailment 
will be extended to deep learning architectures for the compositional 
semantics of texts.  Methods for finding the intersection of information 
in vectors will be extended to clustering texts by  their shared content 
and generating abstract summaries.

The ideal PhD candidate should hold a Master degree in computer science, 
computational linguistics or related fields. She or he should have a 
background in machine learning, optimisation, or natural language 
processing.  The applicant should also have strong programming skills.

The successful PhD candidates will join the Natural Language 
Understanding group at Idiap, under the supervision of Dr. James 
Henderson.  They will also become doctoral students at EPFL 
(http://www.epfl.ch) conditional on parallel application to, and 
acceptance by, the EPFL Doctoral School (http://phd.epfl.ch/applicants). 
Appointment for the PhD position is for a maximum of 4 years, provided 
successful progress, and should lead to a dissertation. Annual gross 
salary ranges from 47,000 Swiss Francs (first year) to 50,000 Swiss 
Francs (last year). Starting date is to be negotiated, within 2018. All 
queries related to the advertised position can be sent to Dr. James 
Henderson (james.henderson at idiap.ch).

Please apply online here:
http://www.idiap.ch/webapps/jobs/ors/applicant/position/index.php?PHP_APE_DR_9e581720b5ef40dc7af21c41bac4f4eb=%7B__TO%3D%27detail%27%3B__PK%3D%2710241%27%7D

Idiap is an independent, not-for-profit, research institute funded by 
the Swiss Federal Government, the State of Valais, and the City of 
Martigny, in a scenic region surrounded by the highest mountains of 
Europe, offering exceptional quality of life, and within close proximity 
to Lausanne and Geneva.  Idiap is an equal opportunity employer and is 
actively involved in the "Advancement of Women in Science" European 
initiative.

Sincerely,
   - James Henderson
     james.henderson at idiap.ch