3 fully funded PhD positions in NLP at NUI Galway, Ireland

[apologies for cross-postings
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Dear all,


Three fully funded PhD positions in Natural Language Processing are 
available at the Unit for Natural Language Processing of the Data 
Science Institute [1] at the National University of Ireland Galway [2]. 
The positions are funded by the Insight SFI Research Centre for Data 
Analytics [3] and will be aligned with the Insight research programme on 
Multimodal Data Analysis. The scholarship comprises a tax free stipend 
of EUR 1542 per month, in addition to university fees.

 1. PhD position on ‘NLP tasks in the context of multimodal and sensor data’

    NLP tasks are no longer limited to the analysis of language as a
    single modality but can access multiple modalities beyond language.
    The advantage of incorporating multimodal approaches to NLP is the
    potential complementarity of the data stored across different
    modalities. The integration of signals coming from text, images,
    video, audio or sensor data has been shown to be useful for improved
    natural language understanding and generation. In this context, the
    PhD position will be concerned with innovative research into the
    representation and exploitation of multimodal and sensor data for
    NLP tasks.


 2. PhD position on ‘Knowledge Graphs for natural language understanding
    in physical settings’

    Knowledge graphs are at the core of modelling reference and
    inference in natural language understanding and multimodal
    reasoning. However, the current state of the art in knowledge graphs
    is incomplete and insufficient for truly effective natural language
    understanding in physical settings. Conversational agents
    (chatbots), robotics and other autonomous systems increasingly
    require an understanding of pragmatic knowledge, such as physical
    dimensions of objects and events and how this is referred to in
    language (verbalized) by human users. In this context, the PhD
    position will be concerned with innovative research into the
    extraction and use of knowledge graphs for natural language
    understanding in physical settings.


 3. PhD position on ‘Leveraging textual, audio and visual modalities
    within machine translation’

    Current approaches to multimodal machine translation leverage
    additional information coming from different modalities, such as
    text, speech or video. Exploiting the additional information in
    these modalities can be used to improve the generated output in a
    different language. This PhD position will focus primarily on
    video-guided translation, which exploits audio and visual
    modalities. In this context, the PhD position will be concerned with
    developing new models and approaches in video-guided machine
    translation beyond the state-of-the-art, with emphasis on real-time
    language processing and translation.


Candidates should:
  - have a Masters degree in a relevant field of study with an emphasis 
on NLP
  - have experience in machine learning and deep learning
  - have good programming skills in Python
  - enjoy working with real-world problems and large data sets
  - have excellent proficiency in English and good communication skills

Please send your application (CV and cover letter in a single PDF, 
please specify your name in the file name) before the closing date of 
May 9th, 2021 to paul.buitelaar@nuigalway.ie and mihael.arcan@nuigalway.ie

[1] https://dsi.nuigalway.ie/units/unlp
[2] https://www.nuigalway.ie
[3] https://www.insight-centre.org/