Connectionists: post-doc in compositional distributional semantics

[Marco Baroni]

1 (RENEWABLE) 2-YEAR POST-DOC POSITION AVAILABLE

The CIMeC-CLIC laboratory of the University of Trento, an
interdisciplinary group of researchers studying language and cognition
using computational and experimental methods announces the
availability of a 2-year Post-Doc position.

The scholarship is partially funded by an European Research Council
Starting Grant awarded to the COMPOSES (COMPositional Operations in
SEmantic SPACE) project (clic.cimec.unitn.it/composes), that aims at
modeling composition in distributional/vector-based semantics.

* Desired Profile *

We seek a brilliant researcher with a background in computational
linguistics or closely related disciplines (e.g., AI, machine
learning, with emphasis on dealing with language problems). Areas of
special interest include:

- Distributional semantic models / word embeddings

- Data-driven compositional methods

- Neural networks, representation learning

- Machine learning with a focus on regression, large-scale
   multivariate problems, incremental/curriculum learning

Good programming and mathematical skills are required.

If you think that your background is relevant to the research program
outlined on the project website (clic.cimec.unitn.it/composes) and you
have good quantitative skills, please get in touch even if you do not
fit the profile above.

* Representative Publications from the COMPOSES project *

Our papers at ACL 2014 can give you an idea of the topics we are
working on (see the website for more):

D. Paperno, N. Pham and M. Baroni. A practical and
linguistically-motivated approach to compositional distributional
semantics:
http://clic.cimec.unitn.it/marco/publications/acl2014/paperno-etal-practical-comp-acl2014.pdf

G. Dinu and M. Baroni. How to make words with vectors: Phrase
generation in distributional semantics:
http://clic.cimec.unitn.it/marco/publications/acl2014/dinu-baroni-generation-acl2014.pdf

M. Baroni, G. Dinu and G. Kruszewski. Don't count, predict! A
systematic comparison of context-counting vs. context-predicting
semantic vectors:
http://clic.cimec.unitn.it/marco/publications/acl2014/baroni-etal-countpredict-acl2014.pdf

A. Lazaridou, E. Bruni and M. Baroni. Is this a wampimuk? Cross-modal
mapping between distributional semantics and the visual world:
http://clic.cimec.unitn.it/marco/publications/acl2014/lazaridou-etal-wampimuk-acl2014.pdf

* The Research Environment *

The CLIC lab (clic.cimec.unitn.it) is a unit of the University of
Trento's Center for Mind/Brain Sciences (CIMeC,
www.unitn.it/en/cimec), an English-speaking, interdisciplinary center
for research on brain and cognition whose staff includes
neuroscientists, psychologists, (computational) linguists, computer
scientists and physicists.

CLIC researchers, also affiliated with the Departments of Computer
Science (DISI) and Psychology (DIPSCO), combine methods from
computational linguistics, computer vision and machine learning, as
well as brain, behavioural and corpus data, to study various aspects
of human cognition.

CLIC is part of the larger network of research labs specializing in
Natural Language Processing and related domains in the Trento region,
one of the areas with the highest concentration of researchers in NLP
and related fields anywhere in Europe.

The CIMeC-CLIC laboratories are located in beautiful Rovereto, a
lively town in the middle of the Alps, famous for its contemporary art
museum, the quality of its wine, and the range of outdoors sport and
relax opportunities it offers (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rovereto).

* Application Information *

For further information, please send an expression of interest to
marco.baroni at unitn.it, attaching a CV. The position is available
immediately and open until filled.

-- 
Marco Baroni
Center for Mind/Brain Sciences (CIMeC)
University of Trento
http://clic.cimec.unitn.it/marco