Belgium : Phd position in Term Alignment in Multilingual Document Collections at About KULeuven

Description: We invite applications for a 4 year PhD position financed by the research project TermWise: Creating Resources for Specialised Language Use. The TermWise project (financed by the IOF - Industrieel OnderzoeksFonds) aims to develop a prototype software tool that offers comprehensive multilingual terminological support to language professionals dealing with specialized language use. Lawyers, doctors or business people all have their own jargon. Knowledge about the typical words and expressions in these disciplines is essential for translators, copy writers or anyone else who deals with specialised texts.

The focus of the PhD research is on term alignment, i.e. the automatic alignment of phrases and words that are translational equivalents in large multilingual document collections. The research covers the study of existing statistical alignment models (e.g., sequence and fertility based models) and the design, development and evaluation of novel alignment algorithms including generative, discriminative and graph models.

The academic objective of the research is a Doctorate in Engineering: Computer Science from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium. Funding is available as from October 2009 up to September 2013 at the rate of a K.U.Leuven PhD bursary (approx. € 26000 nett per annum, which includes holiday and end-of-year allowance, and social security). The research will be performed at the Department of Computer Science at the K.U.Leuven. A close collaboration with the other partners of the TermWise project, who develop technology for term extraction, conceptual modelling, and interface development is foreseen.

The candidate has the following profile:
a) A degree in Computer Science, Informatics or equivalent with a minimum grade of cum laude
b) Interest in computational linguistics and statistical natural language processing.
Because the successful candidate will work as a member of a project group, team spirit is indispensable. Basic knowledge of Dutch and French is required at the time of application, and candidates are expected, and will be given the opportunity, to improve possible gaps in their language skills in the first year of their employment.

Contact information:

Interested applicants should send their CV and letter of application BEFORE 2009-10-08 to:
Prof. Marie-Francine Moens: sien DOT moens AT cs DOT kuleuven DOT be
Dr. Herman Crauwels: herman DOT crauwels AT denayer DOT wenk DOT be
Dr. Kris Heylen: kris DOT heylen AT arts DOT kuleuven DOT be


Key words: information retrieval, text mining, natural language processing

Latest application date: 2009-10-08

Financing: available

Type of Position: scholarship

Duration of the Project : 4 years

Research group: Department of Computer Science

Online Application