Fully-funded Ph.D. positions at Sapienza University of Rome

FULLY-FUNDED PH.D. POSITIONS - MULTILINGUAL NLP (DEEP LEARNING FOR SEMANTIC
PARSING)

Sapienza University of Rome, Italy

Department of Computer Science

Fully-funded Ph.D. positions in Natural Language Processing are open at the
Sapienza University of Rome for foreign students. Students interested in
working in the Linguistic Computing Laboratory (http://lcl.uniroma1.it),
Department of Computer Science of the Sapienza (Italian Department of
Excellence, ranked first in computer science), can choose to work in the
context of a 5-year ERC Consolidator Grant funded by the European Research
Council (ERC) and headed by prof. Roberto Navigli
<http://wwwusers.di.uniroma1.it/~navigli/>, following the success of his
MultiJEDI ERC Starting Grant (http://multijedi.org). The successful
candidate will participate in a frontier research project aimed at
designing and investigating novel neural network architectures for
multilingual disambiguation and semantic parsing and will work in the
vibrant environment of a leading and highly-active international research
team comprising 3 faculty members, 1 post-doc and 6 Ph.D. students. The
group has published dozens of papers in top-tier venues
<http://wwwusers.di.uniroma1.it/~navigli/pubs.html> in the field of
computational linguistics and artificial intelligence.

Ph.D. students in the research group have the option to interact with
Babelscape <http://babelscape.com>, a Sapienza startup company founded by
prof. Navigli which brings cutting-edge research in multilingual Natural
Language Processing to the market and makes research projects, such as the
award-winning BabelNet <http://babelnet.org>, sustainable in the long term.
Babelscape is currently working for key players in different fields,
including multinational companies, and national and international public
bodies. Around 20 developers and researchers currently work in the company.

REQUIREMENTS/QUALIFICATIONS

The successful candidate choosing to work in multilingual NLP will work
actively on new directions in deep learning and neural networks for
multilingual lexical semantic tasks such as Word Sense Disambiguation,
Entity Linking and semantic parsing in arbitrary languages, starting from
successful approaches and resources for multilingual lexical semantics such
as BabelNet <http://babelnet.org> (winner of the 2017 Artificial
Intelligence prominent paper award and featured in The Guardian
<https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/feb/23/oxford-english-dictionary-can-worlds-biggest-dictionary-survive-internet>
and Time magazine
<http://wwwusers.di.uniroma1.it/~navigli/img/Redefining_the_modern_dictionary.png>),
the Multilingual Wikipedia Bitaxonomy <http://wibitaxonomy.org>,
sense-based embedded representations (SensEmbed
<http://lcl.uniroma1.it/sensembed>), and sense-based lexical, semantic and
embedded vectors (NASARI <http://lcl.uniroma1.it/nasari>), state-of-the-art
neural Word Sense Disambiguation
<http://wwwusers.di.uniroma1.it/~navigli/pubs/EMNLP_2017_Raganatoetal.pdf>
and train-o-matic <http://trainomatic.org>.

The candidate is expected to have:

* a M.Sc. or equivalent in Computer Science, Computational Linguistics/NLP,
Mathematics or related fields obtained by 31 July 2018.

* Good programming skills in Python (to improve these skills, there is the
option to attend a Python course at Sapienza on the first contract year).

* Fluent English. Knowledge of Italian is NOT a requirement.

* Knowledge of current neural network models, especially recurrent neural
networks such as LSTMs, and tools for neural networks (e.g. Tensorflow,
Keras, etc.).

* Publications in Computational Linguistics, participation in summer
schools and other experiences are a plus.

Application deadline: 23 April 2018

HOW TO APPLY

Informal inquiries for information on how to apply can be sent by email to
prof. Roberto Navigli (navigli@di.uniroma1.it). The application must
include a brief motivation letter, a detailed CV, a copy of the degree
certificate and list of exams with marks, and two letters of
recommendation. All documents must be in English. Please include the job
reference [FOR-PHD-2018] in the subject line.

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Roberto Navigli
Dipartimento di Informatica
Sapienza University of Rome
Viale Regina Elena 295b (building G, second floor)
00161 Roma Italy
Phone: +39 0649255161 - Fax: +39 06 49918301
Home Page: http://wwwusers.di.uniroma1.it/~navigli
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