Two-year postdoc position in Multilingual NLP and IR

*Two-year postdoc position in Multilingual NLP and IR - University of
Milano-Bicocca*

One *postdoc position* (2 years) at the intersection of* multilingual
Natural Language Processing* and* Information Retrieval* is open in the*
Information and Knowledge Representation, Retrieval and Reasoning Lab* (
http://www.ir.disco.unimib.it/) within the Department of Informatics,
Systems and Communication of the *University of Milano-Bicocca*, Milan,
Italy.

The position is in the context of the *PerLIR project* (Personal Linguistic
resources in Information Retrieval), which is funded by the Italian
Ministry of Research with two research units involved: *University of
Milano-Bicocca* (*Prof. Gabriella Pasi*) and the *Sapienza University of
Rome* (*Prof. Roberto Navigli*, head of the Linguistic Computing Laboratory
(http://lcl.uniroma1.it, Department of Computer Science)

The successful candidate will participate in a frontier research project
aimed at designing and investigating the *impact of personal linguistic
resources in Information Retrieval*. Over the last years the notion of
personalization has become increasingly important and it has affected the
definition of several categories of systems, among which search engines,
with the aim of tailoring the search outcome to specific user needs, and to
her context. The notion of user model is in this context a core one: the
key aspect is to identify and represent the user’s (topical) preferences in
an accurate and sound way. Although it is well known that this improves the
search outcome, some important cognitive characteristics of users are
seldom accounted. Queries are specified by means of a few keywords and the
documents retrieved in response to a query offer a variety of usage of the
language (simple vs. difficult) and of coverage of the query related topic
(high level vs. specialistic). The knowledge that a user may have of a
specific domain, as well as her cognitive background, do strongly affect
the utility that a textual document retrieved in response to a query may
have for that user. The lexicon and the writing style employed in a text
play a key role: for example, a user with a superficial knowledge of a
topic might have problems in understanding a text in which that topic is
technically presented (e.g., through a specialized vocabulary). A focused
research activity is still missing, with the aim of representing user
models that exploit the natural language by accounting for aspects such as
sense disambiguation, multilingualism, compatibility with existing
large-scale linguistic resources (thus ensuring scalability), and easy
alignment with other textual contents.

The aim of the project is to provide groundbreaking techniques able to
bridge the gap between Information Retrieval and multilingual Natural
Language Processing to innovate:

1) The way a user model is created, thanks to the *automatic creation of
language-independent personal linguistic resources*;

2) The exploitation of *personal linguistic resources in Information
Retrieval *to show the benefit of a language-independent, scalable user
representation (which is at the same time customized to both the user
preferences and her language usage) in retrieving the most relevant results
to that user’s queries.

*Requirements/Qualifications*

The candidate is expected to have:

   - a Ph.D. or equivalent in Computer Science, Computational
   Linguistics/NLP, Information Retrieval, Mathematics or related fields.
   - Solid programming skills.
   - Fluent English. Knowledge of other languages is more than welcome.
   Knowledge of Italian is NOT a requirement.
   - Publications in top-tier venues in the field of Information Retrieval
   and/or Computational Linguistics.
   - Experience in Ph.D. student supervision is a plus.

*What we offer*

   - Fixed-term employment contract (2 years, including medical and social
   insurance).
   - The opportunity to live and work in Milan, a dynamic and exciting
   Italian city, with a lot of cultural events, and which appears in several
   rankings of the most visited cities in Europe.
   - The research activity will be carried out under the supervision of
   Prof. Gabriella Pasi, head of the Information and Knowledge Representation,
   Retrieval, and Reasoning (IKR3) Laboratory, at the University of
   Milano-Bicocca, Department of Informatics, Systems, and Communication.
   - The possibility to spend a period of research at the “La Sapienza”
   University of Rome, at the multilingual NLP laboratory led by Prof. Roberto
   Navigli, with whom the project is carried out.
   - Salary: around 28,000 euros per annum. Note that this type of research
   contract includes social insurance (28,000 euros per annum corresponds to
   around 1,650 euros net per month).

*How to apply*

Informal inquiries can be sent by email to Prof. Gabriella Pasi (
gabriella.pasi@unimib.it) .The application requires a brief motivation
letter, a detailed CV and contact details. Please include the job reference
[POSTDOC PRIN-2020] in the subject line.

*Application deadline*

The application will be around January 7th 2020, with starting date on
February 1st 2020.

-- 
=====================================
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
=====================================