Fwd: Two post-doctoral fellowship positions at the National Research Council Canada
Chi-kiu (Jackie) Lo
*Apologies for cross-posting*
Postdoctoral Fellowships, National Research Council Canada
The NRC Advantage
Great Minds. One Goal. Canada's Success.
The National Research Council of Canada (NRC) is the Government of Canada's largest research organization supporting industrial innovation, the advancement of knowledge and technology development. We collaborate with over 70 colleges, universities and hospitals annually, work with 800 companies on their projects, and provide advice or funding to over 8000 Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) each year.
We bring together the brightest minds to deliver tangible impacts on the lives of Canadians and people around the world. And now, we want to partner with you. Let your expertise and inspirations make an impact by joining the NRC.
At the NRC, we know that diversity enables excellence in research and innovation. We are committed to a diverse and representative workforce, a safe and respectful work environment, and contributing to a more inclusive Canadian innovation system. We welcome all qualified applicants and encourage you to complete the employment equity self-declaration questions during the job application process.
The Program
(https://nrc.canada.ca/en/corporate/careers/postdoctoral-fellowship-program)
The NRC’s Postdoctoral Fellowship program offers PDFs access to unique world-class facilities and the opportunity to work alongside multi-disciplinary teams of expert researchers and technicians on projects of critical importance to Canada. PDFs will carry out research on innovative research projects, with opportunities for career development (publications and/or industry interaction).
Project I: Multilingual Machine Translation for Transforming Response to Refugees and Forced Migration
There are
more than 103 million displaced persons in the world today. While English
remains the global language of policy exchange and studies, significant
knowledge on refugee issues appears in other languages spoken where forced
migration occurs. Machine translation (MT) improves the accessibility of
relevant publications across different languages and facilitates fair and
inclusive discussion among international stakeholders. However, challenges with
in-domain multilingual neural machine translation (MNMT) limits the availability
of efficient, affordable and manageable MT with usable translation quality for
forced migration responses.
The successful fellow will collaborate with external collaborators to create an in-domain multiway parallel corpus on forced migration. The corpus will then enable research on MNMT and its adaptation to the forced migration domain. Finally, the fellow will research on training MNMT to translate unseen languages efficiently with minimal resources.
Having compassion about refugees and forced migration issues and ease in
meeting with the forced migration communities around the world would be
beneficial in this role. Due to the topic of the project, the successful
candidate may frequently be working on and with data and clients about refugees
and forced migration issues which may cause triggering responses.
Education Requirement
PhD in Computer Science, Computational Linguistics or related discipline.
Experience Requirement
• Hands on experience in end-to-end MT modelling and
training.
• Research experience in MNMT.
• Research experience in parallel corpus building, domain
adaptation, non-English centric MT or low resource MT.
Asset
Assets are “nice-to-have”
expertise and competencies we’re interested in. Not having them should not
prevent you from applying.
• Ability to read Arabic, Spanish, Russian, Ukrainian, Burmese or Pashto would be an asset.
Further Details and Application Portal
Please
contact Dr. Chi-kiu (Jackie) Lo (Chik...@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca)
for any enquiries about this project.
Project II: Audio search and topic detection for audiovisual corpora in a polysynthetic Indigenous language
NRC is searching for a recent PhD graduate to develop techniques for speech recognition and/or synthesis, using untranscribed audio corpora of speech in Indigenous, polysynthetic languages.
Many such languages spoken in Canada have substantial collections of recorded speech. Language activists, academic linguists, and radio broadcasters have been recording the speech of Elders for decades, but so far only a small fraction has been catalogued, annotated, and transcribed. Thus, there are thousands of hours of recorded speech in Indigenous languages that are inaccessible in practice.
The project will focus primarily on Inuktut, Cree, and/or
Iroquoian languages. Alternative/additional languages are a possibility if
appropriate datasets become available.
Education Requirement
PhD in computational linguistics, computer science or a related field.
Experience Requirement
• Experience in
speech/natural language processing (NLP) technology.
• Experience in either automatic speech recognition or speech
synthesis.
• Experience working with Indigenous languages and
communities.
Further Details and Application Portal
Please contact Dr. Roland Kuhn (Rolan...@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca) and Dr. Patrick Littell (Patrick...@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca) for any enquiries about this project.
Condition of Employment
Reliability Status
Who is eligible?
- Fellowships will be for two years contingent on satisfactory progress achieved during the first year.
- Candidates should have obtained a PhD (or equivalent) within the past three years (PhD received on or after July 1, 2020) or expect to complete their PhD within 6 months of appointment.
- Fellows will work in a lab under the direct supervision of an NRC researcher.
Application Requirements
In order to be considered for the program please include the following in your application, please note that you will need to attach the required documents as per the list below when submitting your application. Failure to do so will result in your application being excluded from searches.
- Resume
- Statement of Interest in the project (maximum one page in length)
- PhD Transcript - an electronic copy is sufficient, it does not have to be an official version.
- List of Publications
In addition, applicants who best meet the requirements of the position will be asked to provide three letters of recommendation at a later stage of the competition process.
Relocation
Relocation assistance will be determined in accordance with the NRC's directives.
Compensation
The intent of this hiring action is to staff through the Postdoctoral Fellowships Program at the RCO-2/AsRO level, which is an early-career level position with a salary range of $74,230 to $103,093.
NOTE: Salary determination will be based on a review of the candidate’s expertise, outcomes and impacts of their previous work experience relative to the requirements of the level.
NRC employees enjoy a wide-range of competitive benefits including comprehensive health and dental plans, pension and insurance plans, vacation and other leave entitlements.
Closing Date:
27 March 2023 - 23:59 Eastern Time
Dr. Chi-kiu (Jackie) Lo 羅致翹博士
Research Officer, Multilingual Text Processing
Digital Technologies Research Centre
National Research Council Canada
Government of Canada
Email: Chik...@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca / Telephone: +1 613-993-5205
M50, 1200 Montreal Road, Ottawa ON, K1A 0R6 Canada