Researcher, part-time 75% at DFKI Saarbrücken. PhD position in multi-modal sign language translation with deep learning.

[Cristina España-Bonet]

[Apologies for cross-postings]

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  Researcher, part-time 75% at DFKI Saarbrücken. PhD position in multi-modal sign language translation with deep learning
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The MT group at DFKI Saarbrücken is looking for a PhD researcher in sign language translation using deep learning.

Key responsibilities:
- Research and development of novel technologies for sign language (SL) translation and interpretation
- Design of end-to-end architectures text-to-SL and SL-to-text
- Modality combinations(text, image, video and sensors)
- Design of deep learning modules for modality conversion
- Contribution to scientific publications
- Possibility of teaching at Saarland University

Desired qualifications:
- Master in CS (alternatively CL, NLP or related)
- Strong background in machine learning and deep learning
- Excellent problem solving skills
- Excellent programming skills, especially in Python (PyTorch and/or Tensorflow libraries). Java, bash and C are an asset
- Excellent communication skills and command of written and oral English (German not required but an asset)

Application:

Applications should include a short cover letter, a CV, a brief summary of research interests, and contact information for three references. Please submit your application by November 30, 2020 as PDF to Dr. Cristina España i Bonet (cris...@dfki.de) indicating your earliest possible start date. The position remains open until filled.

Working environment:

The post is part of the “Multilinguality and Language Technology” (MLT) lab at DFKI (the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence) in Saarbrücken, Germany. The lab is headed by Prof. Josef van Genabith. MLT consists of highly international teams combining basic research and applications. MLT has research groups in MT, QA/IE, human-robot communication, and data and resources. DFKI is one of the leading AI centers worldwide, with several sites in Germany. DFKI Saarbrücken is  part of the Saarland University (UdS) Informatics Campus. UdS has exceptionally strong CS and CL schools, a Max Planck Institute for Informatics, a Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, the Center for Bioinformatics, and the CISPA  Helmholz Center for Information Security.

Geographic environment:

Saarbrücken  (http://www.saarbruecken.de/en) is the capital of Saarland, one of the smaller Federal States in Germany,  located right in the heart of Europe and a cultural center of the border region of Germany, France and Luxembourg. Frankfurt and Paris are less than 2 hours by train. Living costs are moderate in comparison with other large cities in Germany and Europe.

Selected MLT MT group publications in 2020:
- Chowdhury et al. Understanding Translationese in Multi-View Embedding Spaces. COLING 2020.
- Pal et al. The Transference Architecture for Automatic Post-Editing. COLING 2020.
- Ruiter et al. Self-Induced Curriculum Learning in Self-Supervised Neural Machine Translation. EMNLP 2020.
- Zhang et al. Translation Quality Estimation by Jointly Learning to Score and Rank. EMNLP 2020.
- Xu et al. Dynamically Adjusting Transformer Batch Size by Monitoring Gradient Direction Change. ACL 2020.
- Xu et al. Learning Source Phrase Representations for Neural Machine Translation. ACL 2020.
- Xu et al. Lipschitz Constrained Parameter Initialization for Deep Transformers. ACL 2020.
- Herbig et al. MMPE: A Multi-Modal Interface for Post-Editing Machine Translation. ACL 2020.
- Herbig et al. MMPE: A Multi-Modal Interface using Handwriting, Touch Reordering and Speech Commands for Post-Editing Machine Translation. ACL 2020.
- Alabi et al. Massive vs. Curated Embeddings for Low-Resourced Languages: the Case of Yorùbá and Twi. LREC 2020.
- Xu et al. Efficient Context-Aware Neural Machine Translation with Layer-Wise Weighting and Input-Aware Gating. IJCAI 2020.