Two salaried PhD positions in Machine Translation at Sheffield University – Marie Curie ITN project EXPERT

Applications are invited for two 3-year Early Stage Researcher PhD positions in corpus-based approaches to machine translation. The positions have been awarded as part of the new EU FP7 Marie-Curie Initial raining Network EXPERT (http://clg.wlv.ac.uk/projects/EXPERT/), concerned with the exploitation of empirical approaches to machine translation, including statistical machine translation and example-based machine translation. The EXPERT project puts together researchers from six European universities (The University of Sheffield, Universidad de Malaga, Universitaet des Saarlandes, Dublin City University, Universiteit van Amesterdam, and University of Wolverhampton) and five translation services and technology providers (Pangeanic, Hermes and Translated, Celer Soluciones and WordFast).
The two projects allocated to the University of Sheffield are (i) learning from human feedback, which is concerned about methods to collect and incorporate human feedback into translation systems to improve the quality of translations; and (ii) estimating the quality and confidence of corpus-based approaches to machine translation and the quality of translated texts.
The work in both projects will focus on statistical and machine learning techniques to address the problems, but it will also involve aspects of human translation studies, based on a strong interaction with some of the partners in EXPERT. The research will be conducted as part of the Natural Language Processing research group in Sheffield, with opportunities for collaborative work with several of the leading universities and industrial partners in EXPERT, and with the expectation of a 6-month secondment to 2-3 partners in this project. Further information about the research group can be found at: http://nlp.dcs.shef.ac.uk
The successful individual will be employed as a salaried researcher at the University of Sheffield, while studying towards his/her PhD. Salary rates and additional mobility and training allowances are as per the Marie Curie programme (see Annex 3 of this document http://ec.europa.eu/research/participants/portal/download?docId=31562, page 69). For employment in the UK, the reference figure for gross salary is 51,062 euros/year, plus additional contribution towards mobility and training.
Please check Section III.3 of the following link for further information on the Marie Curie scheme regarding eligibility criteria: ftp://ftp.cordis.europa.eu/pub/fp7/docs/fp7-mga-annex3intramulti_en.pdf. In particular, candidates cannot have lived in the UK for more than 12 months in the 3 years immediately prior to their appointment.
Applicants should hold a good honours degree in a relevant field of study (e.g. computer science, engineering, mathematics) and have experience in natural language processing, machine translation or related area. They should also have a solid background in mathematics/statistics and excellent programming skills (C/C++, Java, Python/Perl, etc.). See the job specification for more details on the expected profile: http://www.dcs.shef.ac.uk/~lucia/resources/EXPERT_Marie_Curie_Early_Stage_Researcher.pdf
The post is fixed term for three years with a start date of January 2013 or soon after.
Closing Date: 10th December 2012

For applications: http://www.shef.ac.uk/jobs, Search and apply for jobs, job reference number: UOS005598
In addition to submitting applications to the University of Sheffield, candidates should apply via the website provided by project coordinator: http://clg.wlv.ac.uk/projects/EXPERT/.

For informal enquiries about this job and department, contact: Dr Lucia Specia on l.specia@sheffield.ac.uk