Position as postdoctoral research fellow (SKO 1352) available at The Department for 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 800 students on the Bachelor level, nearly 300 Master-level students, and more than 200 PhD students. The total staff of the Department is over 250 employees, of which about 150 are full-time scientific positions, with about 60 professors and associate professors..

The post-doctoral fellowship is for a duration of three years. As part of the appointment, a limited amount of teaching, supervision, or other non-research duties may be assigned, in mutual agreement with the successful candidate. No post-doctoral fellow can be appointed for more than one specified period at the same institution.

Job Description:

This position is part of a new research project, with funding from the Norwegian Research Council. Project participants are the Universities of Oslo (coordinator), Bergen, and Stanford, with additional international collaborators in Europe, the US, and Australia. The project seeks to develop large-scale semantic parsing technology for user-generated Web content, with a focus on English and Norwegian Bokmål.

The LT research area has its focus in hybrid approaches to Natural Language Processing, with emphasis on the interplay of grammatical analysis and semantics. The ideal candidate will have competency in both rule-based and statistical methods within Computational Linguistics, as well as an understanding of the use of these methods in core NLP tasks like parsing, lexical acquisition, 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 at least a minimal level of implementation experience is desirable for this position. The project builds on existing resources from the DELPH-IN and ParGram repositories, for English and Norwegian, respectively. Some prior experience within the relevant frameworks (e.g. constraint-based grammar and semantics: HPSG, LFG, and MRS) or familiarity with some of the tools involved would be especially welcome; so would be knowledge of data-driven approaches to lexical acquisition and parsing; and of course of the grammar of the languages involved in the project. Research at UiO has its focus on English, hence proficiency in Norwegian is not a prerequisite (though could be a plus). Finally, a personal interest and readyness to contribute to teaching in Computational Linguistics (at the undergraduate and graduate levels) and supervision of MSc (and possibly also PhD) candidates is expected.

Requirements:

The candidate must hold a PhD or other corresponding education equivalent to a Norwegian doctoral degree in the fields of Computational Linguistics or Computer Science (with a specialization in Language Technology). The position is hosted at the focal research area in Language Technology (LT) at IFI. For background on the research environment, please see:

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

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

The main purpose of post-doctoral research fellowships is to qualify researchers for work in top academic positions within their disciplines. Please also refer to the regulations pertaining to the conditions of employment for post-doctoral fellowship positions:

http://www.uio.no/admhb/reglhb/personal/tilsettingvitenskapelig/regulationstermcondition.xml

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

http://www.mn.uio.no/english/research/doctoral-degree-abd-career/regulations/proficiency-requirements.html

Salary

Pay grade: 57 – 64 (NOK 455 900 – 518 800 per year, depending on qualifications and seniority)

The application must include:

The application must include all of the following documents in order to be considered:

• Application letter
• Statement of research interests 
• CV (summarizing education, positions, pedagogical experience, administrative experience and other qualifying activity
• Copies of educational certificates, transcript of records, letters of recommendation
• A complete list of publications and up to five papers or other relevant academic works that the applicant would like to be considered by the evaluation committee
• Names and contact details of 2-3 references (name, relation to candidate, e-mail and telephone number)

Foreign applicants are strongly advised to attach an institutionally issued explanation of their University's grading system. Please remember that all documents should be in English or a Scandinavian language.

Closing date for applications: August 14, 2011

The University of Oslo has an agreement for all employees, aiming to secure rights to research results a.o.

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