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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 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(version 5 will be out soon this fall) into neural network models. The position is funded by the KnowGraphs ITN project 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, 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 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 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 in the Department of Computer Science at the Sapienza University of Rome is a research team led by prof. Roberto 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) and the ELEXIS European electronic lexicographic infrastructure, and an Italian project (PerLIR), with several ongoing international collaborations.