Job in Machine Translation: 2-year research position at Sheffield University

[Reza E.]

The Department of Computer Science has a position for a Research
Associate in Machine Translation. The position is funded by the EU FP7
as part of the QTLaunchPad project, which will investigate how to
measure and overcome quality barriers in Machine Translation (MT).

QTLaunchPad is a support action which aims at producing a better
environment for large-scale collaborative research on high-quality MT,
and preparing and launching a large international action dedicated to
a scientifically and economically significant breakthrough in quality
translation technology.  Key to this project are the methodological
and empirical foundations of research toward breaking the
quality-barriers. As a partner in this project, the University of
Sheffield will be primarily responsible for the Quality Estimation
methods and software and its use for guiding MT, but will also
contribute to the analysis of quality barriers and design of quality
metrics.

At the University of Sheffield the project will be led by Dr Lucia
Specia (http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~lucia/). The research will build
upon the group's leading research in statistical modelling of the
quality estimation problem. It will employ a Research Associate for up
to 24 months, available to start July 2012. The role will require the
post holder to undertake research and software development on quality
estimation, and to collaborate with other researchers working on the
QTLaunchPad Project (Sheffield, DCU-Dublin, DFKI-Saarbrücken and
ILSP-Athens).

This is an opportunity to work in a well-connected international team
with world-leading reputations in the Natural Language Processing
(NLP) research group at The University of Sheffield. The NLP group is
well known internationally for its research, and is one of the largest
research groups in computational linguistics and text engineering in
the UK. There are excellent opportunities for publications, project
and conference trips. For suitably qualified candidates, possibilities
exist to contribute to teaching, for example as part of an MSc in
Computer Science with Speech and Language Processing.

Applicants should have:

- PhD (or equivalent work experience) in a related area
- Experience in natural language processing
- Acquaintance with Machine Translation
- Programming experience, e.g., in C++ , Java,  Perl/Python

Experience in machine learning, experience in evaluation of machine
translation and multilingual background (English and especially one of
the following languages of the Project: Portuguese, Greek, or German)
are a plus.

Salary for this grade: £28,401 - £35,938 per annum with potential to
progress to £37,012 per annum.

For informal inquiries contact Dr. Lucia Specia: L.Sp...@sheffield.ac.uk

For applications: http://www.shef.ac.uk/jobs, Search and apply for
jobs using reference number UOS004520

Closing date: 25 May 2012.