Abu-MaTran:
automatic
building of machine translation
Marie
Curie IAPP project FP7-PEOPLE-2012-IAPP
24-month recruitment of a
postdoctoral researcher
Overview
Prompsit
is a research-shaped company created in 2006 inside the
Transducens
research group at the Department of Software and Computing Systems
(Universitat d'Alacant - Spain). It's a leading company in the
development of machine translation, specially
linguistically-motivated systems such as Apertium
rule-based systems or linguistically-augmented Moses
statistical systems. The company activity in R&D is intense
both
as an industry-driven activity or by participation in public
national
and international R&D programs.
Abu-MaTran
(Automatic Building of Machine Translation) is an IAPP-FP7
project in which the company is currently involved. The project
aims
at increasing the hitherto low industrial adoption of machine
translation by identifying crucial cutting-edge research
techniques
(automatic acquisition of corpora and linguistic resources, pivot
techniques, linguistically augmented statistical translation and
diagnostic evaluation) and preparing them to be suitable for
commercial exploitation.
Besides Prompsit as a central node of
interaction, the project involves four top research institutions
(Dublin City University
- project coordinator, Universitat d'Alacant,
University of Zagreb
and Institute for Language
and
Speech Processing).
At Prompsit, the project will be led by researcher Sergio Ortiz
Rojas, responsible for most of the code of the Apertium MT
platform,
Prompsit's linguistically-augmented Moses system, a modular
version
of the Bitextor
parallel text collector and other natural language processing
tools
for information extraction or opinion analysis.
The position involves research,
development and participation in outreach activities to achieve
the
goals of the Abu-MaTran project as well as collaboration with all
researchers in the project.
Job Description
Main Duties and Responsibilities
-
Investigate, in collaboration with
the partners, better techniques to automate:
-
monolingual and bilingual
general and domain-focused corpora acquisition
-
monolingual and bilingual
terminology extraction
-
automatic induction of
transfer rules
-
building of pivot or
linguistically-augmented machine translation systems
-
machine translation automatic
evaluation
-
Implement the techniques for each
of the previous points
-
Carry out experiments to evaluate
their performance.
-
Release the output as
free/open-source tools with appropriate interfaces to use
them.
-
Write the appropriate
documentation for each of the work lines: technical
documentation for developers, academic-oriented (papers,
posters, etc.) publications, and tutorials or manuals for
developers.
-
Attend project-related conferences
and meetings
-
Present the results at relevant
conferences and scientific meetings
-
Review work plan with the
collaborators according to project intermediate milestones and
results.
-
Get involved and give support to
outreach activities (linguistic olympiads, FreeRBMT workshop)
Person Specification
Applicants should provide evidence in
their applications that they meet the following criteria.
The staff in charge of this
recruitment
process, will use a range of selection methods to measure
candidates'
abilities in these areas including reviewing your application,
seeking references, inviting shortlisted candidates to be
interviewed, and other forms of assessment action relevant to the
post.
Criteria
Qualifications (compulsory):
PhD
in Computer Science (or at least 4 years of full-time research
experience) and less than 10 years of full-time research
experience.
International procedure
(compulsory): the
candidate
cannot have worked or lived for more than 12 months within the
last 3
years in Spain.
Experience in:
-
Natural language processing,
particularly in machine translation (compulsory).
-
User-level or developer-level
experience in Apertium, Moses, OpenMaTrEx, Bitextor, FBC and
FMC, ccLexExtractor and DELiC4MT (desirable)
-
Data acquisition (desirable)
-
Terminology extraction (desirable)
-
Machine learning (desirable)
-
MT evaluation (desirable)
-
Creation of user interfaces and
software releasing/sharing (desirable)
Programming languages:
C++, Python, PHP (compulsory). JAVA (desirable).
Multilingual skills: Good level
of English (compulsory). Basic knowledge of Spanish or Catalan
(desirable). Knowledge of the South Slavic Languages targeted in
the
project use case -- Croatian, Bosnian, Serbian or Montenegrin and
Slovenian (desirable).
Good writing and communication
skills: ability to
intercommunicate with people and to communicate results, ideas,
etc.
(compulsory).
Collaborative working skills:
ability to take and delegate
responsibilities (compulsory).
Experience in free/open-source
software development:
participation in free/open-source software development projects
as
user or, better, as contributor (desirable).
Experience in transfer of knowledge
between the industry and the academy:
interaction between industry and academy in previous positions
is
highly valued (desirable).
Creativity and flexibility skills:
ability to be open to
different
ideas or opinions, to analyse and solve problems and to make
decisions (desirable).
Active research skills:
ability to follow state-of-the-art research lines
associated
with the project, to learn and acquire new skills relevant to the
project, to write scientific works, and to meet deadlines
(desirable).
Further Information
This post is fixed-term and full-time
at Prompsit (Elx/Elche, Spain). The starting date is January 2014
and
duration is 24 months. Splits are not possible.
Terms and conditions of employment:
Terms and conditions will be according
to the stipulations of the IAPP program. The recruited candidate
will
have a full-time contract with full social security coverage
subject
to the Spanish laws and taxes.
Salary:
For an Experience Researcher with less
than 10 year experience the stipulated salary will be a €57,154
per
year gross salary corresponding to living allowance and
additionally
€683/€977 per month for mobility allowance (depending on family
charges).
Closing date:
1st June 2013.
Informal enquiries:
For informal enquiries about this job
contact us at info-y6CagUfFfa1Wk0Htik3J/w@public.gmane.org.
--
Mikel L. Forcada (
http://www.dlsi.ua.es/~mlf/)
Departament de Llenguatges i Sistemes Informàtics
Universitat d'Alacant
E-03071 Alacant, Spain
Phone: +34 96 590 9776
Fax: +34 96 590 9326
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