Connectionists: Two PhD positions in deep learning for Natural Language Understanding at Idiap (Switzerland)
James Henderson
james.henderson at idiap.ch
Mon Apr 30 05:47:13 EDT 2018
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
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