AAA Data Science Postdoctoral researcher or PhD candidate in Computational Linguistics

Faculty of Humanities (VU) & Faculty of Exact Sciences (VU)

VU University Amsterdam is one of the leading institutions for higher education in Europe and aims to be inspiring, innovative, and committed to societal welfare. It compromises twelve faculties and has teaching facilities for 25.000 students.

The Faculty of Sciences performs research in the areas Life & Health, Networked World, Fundamentals of Science, and Energy & Sustainability. More than 1700 students participate in mono- and interdisciplinary bachelor and master courses. The staff is hosted in the departments of Physics, Chemistry & Pharmaceutical Sciences, Mathematics, and Computer Sciences.

Amsterdam Data Science, an initiative of the University of Amsterdam (UvA), VU University Amsterdam (VU), Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA), and Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) is looking for 14 researchers at the postdoctoral/PhD level. These positions are funded by the Amsterdam Academic Alliance (AAA), a joint initiative of the UvA and VU aimed at intensifying collaboration with each other and knowledge institutions in the region, to cement Amsterdam's position as a hub of academic excellence. These positions are partially co-funded by CWI, Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences of the UvA, HvA, ORTEC, Spinoza fund of Prof. Vossen, and VUmc.

Amsterdam Data Science provides a network in which some 300 Amsterdam based scientists exchange Data Science knowledge and forge partnerships within and outside the academic community. This comprises the foundations of data science and data science for the life sciences, social analytics, business analytics, and digital humanities.

This advertisement concerns one of the 14 positions. The Network Institute of the VU University of Amsterdam is looking for a motivated Postdoctoral researcher or PhD candidate for the project 'From text to Deep Data'. The candidate will be part of the Network Institute of the VU University Amsterdam and will work within multidisciplinary teams of humanities researchers and computer scientists. 

The work will be done in the context of a larger research program called 'QuPiD2: Quality and Perspectives in Deep Data' in collaboration with other researchers aiming all together to achieve a formal modeling of quality and perspectives.

Project description

As part of the QuPiD2 research team, the candidate will develop:

1. a perspective model for representing the subjective relation between the source of information and the statements in it, and
2. software to detect such interpersonal communication layers and perspectives from text. The project will transform big unstructured text data into deep data that show the emotions, opinions and view points on the changing world. It will reveal the social networks and dynamics within trust networks that influence our world views.

Tasks

• Studying existing models for handling provenance, attribution, sentiments, opinions and emotions as expressed in text;
• developing an overarching perspective model for representing the subjective relations between sources and their statements. The model will initially be based on textual data but should show the capacity to model perspectives on any type of (big) data;
• using semantic web standards, e.g. RDF, SPARQL, to represent and access the data within the project;
• studying existing NLP approaches to detect perspective relations in texts. Both English and Dutch texts will be considered;
• developing a machine-crowd empowered processing of textual sources for populating the QuPiD2 model;
• creating data sets for training and evaluation through expert annotation and crowd annotation;
• developing new components and approaches to obtain the perspective values within the model from textual data;
• evaluate the components against the data sets developed and within an application environment;
• collaboration with the QuPiD2 program research team;
• publish the results of the work as scientific articles in high ranked journals and conferences, as well as present the work at relevant scientific venues

Requirements

The candidate should have a strong background (MA) in computational linguistics and semantic web technology with expertise in data modelling, modelling perspectives, subjectivity and attribution relations expressed in natural language. The candidate should have sufficient programming skills and experience with data engineering and text mining.

Further information

For additional information please contact:

• Prof. Piek Vossen

  T: +31 (0)681773878 / +31 (0)20 59 86457

• Dr. Lora Aroyo
  T: +31 (0)20 620329972

• Working at VU

Appointment

The appointment will be for a period of three years for a postdoctoral researcher and four years for a PhD candidate. We have excellent employment conditions such as:

• remuneration of 8,3% end-of-year bonus and 8% holiday allowance;
• solid pension scheme (ABP);
• a minimum of 29 holidays In case of full-time employment;
• possibilities to save up holidays for sabbatical leave.

For a postdoctoral researcher the salary will be in accordance with university regulations for academic personnel, and depending on experience, range from a minimum of €2,476 gross per month up to a maximum of €3,908 gross per month (salary scale 10) based on a full-time employment.

For a PhD candidate, the salary will range from a minimum of €2,125 gross per month in the first year up to a maximum of €2,717 based on full-time employment.

The Collective Labour Agreement for Dutch Universities is applicable.

Job application

Applications may only be submitted via informatica.secretariaat.few@vu.nl. To process your application immediately, please quote vacancy number 15112 and the title of the position you are applying for in the subject-line.

Applications must include a detailed curriculum vitae, BSc and MSc academic transcripts, a motivation letter explaining why you are the right candidate, list of projects you have worked on with brief descriptions of your contributions and the names and contact addresses of two academic references from which information about the candidate can be obtained. All these should be grouped in one PDF attachment.

Applications will be accepted until 10 May 2015.

No agencies please