Position as researcher (SKO 1108 or 1109), available at the Department of Informatics

The Department of Informatics (IFI) is one of nine departments belonging to the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences at the University of Oslo. IFI is Norway’s largest university department for general education and research in Computer Science and related topics. You can read more about the Department here: http://www.ifi.uio.no. The Department has close to 1,000 students on the Bachelor level, some 400 Master-level students, and over 200 PhD students. The total staff of the department is close to 250 employees, of which about 150 are full-time scientific positions, with about 60 professors and associate rofessors.

The researcher position is for a limited duration of three years; the appointment will be made in category SKO 1109 for applicants with a complete PhD, or in category SKO1108 for applicants with a complete MSc or equivalent.

Job Description:

This position is part of a new national initiative to create a computational research infrastructure for the increased application of Natural Language Processing in the humanities and social sciences, in connection to the pan-European CLARIN initiative (http://www.clarin.eu). The position will be based at the Language Technology Group (LTG) at IFI, whose main contribution to the project will be web-accessible, large-scale language analysis tools for several languages. These services will be realized on top of the Norwegian national HPC facilities (specifically, a very large and heterogeneous cluster), and development and deployment will be coordinated with the UiO IT services for scientific computing.

The LT Group at IFI has its focus in hybrid approaches to Natural Language Processing, with emphasis on the interplay of grammar, statistics, and semantics. The ideal candidate will have some competency in rule-based and statistical methods within Computational Linguistics, as well as an understanding of the use of these methods in core NLP tasks like tagging, parsing, information extraction, sentiment analysis, or others. Such a hybrid background will be a strong plus, but not an absolute requirement. The group pursues a predominantly applied research agenda, hence solid implementation experience and general technical CS competency are desirable for this position. The project in part builds on existing resources, for example from the DELPH-IN, ParGram, and VISL repositories, for English, Norwegian, and other languages. Some prior experience within the relevant frameworks or familiarity with some of the tools involved would be especially welcome; as would be experience in designing complex NLP architectures or use of high-performance computing for NLP. Research at UiO will not target a single specific language, hence proficiency in Norwegian is not a prerequisite.

This position has no teaching duties, but as part of the appointment, a limited amount of teaching, supervision, or other non-research duties may be arranged by mutual agreement.

Requirements:

The candidate must hold an MSc degree (for applications in SKO 1108) or PhD degree (SKO 1109) or other equivalent education in the fields of Computer Science, with a specialization in Language Technology, or Computational Linguistics. The position is hosted at the IFI Research Group in Language Technology (LTG). For further background on the research environment, please see:

http://www.mn.uio.no/ifi/english/research/groups/ltg/

Applicants are expected to include a summary of academic specialization and statement of scientific interests.

UiO (and Norway more generally) is a multi-lingual environment, where knowledge of Norwegian is not a necessity in everyday life. However, a good command of English is required; see:

http://www.matnat.uio.no/english/research/education/proficiency_in_English.html

Submissions:

Please refer to the regulations pertaining to the conditions of employment for researcher positions:

http://www.admin.uio.no/admhb/reglhb/personal/tilsettingvitenskapelig/rules-use-research-post.xml

Salary: Researcher SKO 1108, pay grade: 47 – 58 (NOK 384 900 – 464 400) or

           Researcher SKO 1109, pay grade: 57 – 64 (NOK 456 100 – 519 000), per year, depending on qualifications and seniority)

The application must include:

• Application letter
• Statement of research interests
• CV (summarizing education, positions, pedagogical experience, administrative experience and other qualifying activity)
• Copies of educational certificates and letters of recommendation, as applicable
• A complete list of publications and up to 5 academic works that the applicant wishes to be considered by the evaluation committee
• Names and contact details of two or three references (name, relation to candidate, email, and telephone number

Please remember that all documents shoud be in English or a Scandinavian language.

Closing date for applications:  22 April 2012

UiO has an agreement for all employees, aiming to secure rights to research results a.o.

The University of Oslo has a goal of recruiting more women in academic positions. Women are encouraged to apply.

In accordance with the University of Oslo’s equal opportunities policy, we invite applications from all interested individuals regardless of gender or ethnicity.