Pre-Ph.D.+Ph.D. at Babelscape + Sapienza University, Rome, Italy

*PRE-PH.D.+PH.D. RESEARCH POSITION IN Multilingual NLP*

*Babelscape srl*, Rome, Italy, and
*Sapienza NLP*, Department of Computer Science, Sapienza University of
Rome, Italy

*Deadline: *as soon as the position is filled

*Babelscape *(http://babelscape.com), a successful multilingual NLP company
with 20+ employees, jointly with the internationally renowned NLP group
<http://nlp.uniroma1.it> at the *Sapienza University of Rome*, *offers a
full-time, EU-funded, 3-year position *to work on the automatic
construction, alignment and maintenance of lexicalized knowledge graphs
such as *commonsense networks,* *multilingual electronic dictionaries*,
*encyclopedias*, *thesauri*, etc., including the *development of novel
neural architectures, *e.g. the automatic generation of explanations, and
the *integration of explicit semantics *from lexicalized knowledge graphs
like BabelNet <https://babelnet.org> (version 5 will be out soon this fall)
into neural network models. The position is funded by the KnowGraphs ITN
project <https://knowgraphs.eu/> focused on research on knowledge graphs.

The candidate will have the freedom to work at *Babelscape's brand new
offices *in the central *S. Giovanni neighborhood* (10 minutes from the
Colosseum), where several NLP engineers and researchers work on
cutting-edge multilingual NLP, and at the* Sapienza NLP group *in the
Department of Computer Science of the Sapienza University of Rome (*main
campus*, in the University neighborhood, 20 minutes from Babelscape's
offices). Both Sapienza NLP and Babelscape are *very active in the field of
multilingual Natural Language Understanding*: this year, we published tens
of papers at ACL, EMNLP, AAAI, IJCAI, LREC, Artificial Intelligence
Journal.


The *successful candidate will start his/her work immediately and enrol in
a Ph.D. in 2021* (by applying to a special grant funded by Babelscape and
dedicated to its employees) in the Department of Computer Science at the
Sapienza University of Rome under the supervision of prof. Roberto Navigli
<http://wwwusers.di.uniroma1.it/~navigli/>, leading an
internationally-renowned group of 20 researchers and Ph.D. students in
multilingual Natural Language Understanding.

*Duties and responsibilities*

The selected candidate will carry out research on novel methods for
constructing and interlinking multilingual lexicographic knowledge graphs,
including integrating multilingual lexical and commonsense semantics into
neural network architectures to enhance Natural Language Understanding
tasks. During the project the researcher will be hosted at a partner
academic organization for one secondment in order to work on a specific
topic. The host organization is fixed.

*Profile*


   - M.Sc. in computer science, AI, computational linguistics or related
   fields.
   - Proficiency in Python.
   - Knowledge of deep learning architectures and PyTorch is a plus.
   - Excellent communication skills.
   - The candidate *may not have resided or carried out his/her main
   activity in Italy for more than 12 months in the last 3 years.*
   - The candidate must be, at the time of recruitment,* in the first four
   years of her/his research career* (measured from the date when the
   candidate obtained the degree which would formally entitle her/him to
   embark on a doctorate).

*Remuneration*

The selected researcher will receive a living allowance (*3270 euros gross
per month*) and a mobility allowance (*600 euros per month*). In case the
recruited fellow has family at the time of recruitment, s/he will also
receive a family allowance of *500 euros per month*. All Institutional
costs (e.g., Ph.D. enrolment) are covered.

*How to apply*

If interested, please *write to jobs@babelscape.com <jobs@babelscape.com>*
specifying *[KNOWGRAPHS] information/application * for information or for
application, respectively, in the latter case including Europass format CV,
a motivation letter, copies of your diplomas and grades, previous
employment descriptions (with references, publications, TOEFL or IELTS and
GRE scores) and up to 2 letters of recommendations. Pre-selection will be
made on the basis of CVs. The most qualified applicants will be invited to
a Skype interview and they will be tested for their professional skills and
abilities.

Babelscape is an equal opportunity employer. Applications from women are
particularly encouraged. Applications from disabled people with appropriate
suitability are explicitly welcome. All suitably qualified candidates will
be considered, irrespective of gender, race, culture or nationality.

*Starting date and duration*

The successful candidate will start as early as possible. The duration will
be 3 years + extension to cover the whole Ph.D.

*About Babelscape*

Babelscape <http://babelscape.com> is a high-tech Sapienza startup company
founded in 2016 focused on multilingual Natural Language Processing with
the main goal of enabling multilinguality and text understanding in
customers’ applications which deal with text in different ways. Thanks to
technological transfer from the internationally renowned Natural Language
Processing research group headed by prof. Roberto Navigli at the Sapienza
University of Rome, winner of two European Research Council grants and of
several international awards, the company places itself on the market with
very high professional profiles and the ability to tailor its solutions to
the customers' needs.

The company's core mission is to overcome the language barriers by enabling
the automatic processing of text independently of the input language, and
distilling and aggregating the information extracted across languages by
means of a unified large-scale multilingual knowledge repository and
semantically-enhanced text comprehension systems.

*About Sapienza NLP*

The Sapienza NLP Group <http://nlp.uniroma1.it> in the Department of
Computer Science at the Sapienza University of Rome is a research team led
by prof. Roberto Navigli <http://wwwusers.di.uniroma1.it/~navigli/> which
currently includes around 20 members, among Ph.D. students and Postdocs.
The group focuses on multilingual Natural Language Understanding, including
multilingual lexical and sentence-level semantics, multilingual resource
creation (BabelNet, VerbAtlas, SensEmBERT, Train-O-Matic, and many others),
with state-of-the-art systems for multilingual and cross-lingual Word Sense
Disambiguation, Semantic Role Labeling, Semantic Parsing.
The group is currently funded by two EU projects, an ERC Consolidator Grant
(MOUSSE <http://mousse-project.org>) and the ELEXIS <http://elex.is>
European electronic lexicographic infrastructure, and an Italian project
(PerLIR), with several ongoing international collaborations.


-- 
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Roberto Navigli
*Full Professor*
Department of Computer Science
Sapienza University of Rome
Viale Regina Elena, 295b
00161 Roma Italy
Phone: +39 0649255161 - Fax: +39 06 49918301
Home Page: http://wwwusers.di.uniroma1.it/~navigli
Sapienza NLP Group: http://nlp.uniroma1.it
Co-founder of Babelscape srl <http://babelscape.com>
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