Research Scientist - Language Processing, Text Mining

The Leibniz Institute for Educational Research and Educational Information (DIPF) [1] in Frankfurt am Main is a federally and state-funded member of the Leibniz Association. The Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing Lab at the DIPF's Information Center for Education currently seeking a

Research or Lead Scientist (full-time, for an initial term of two years, at the EG13 or EG14 TV-H pay grade)

in the field of

automatic language processing, text mining, and information management

for the Frankfurt am Main location.

The position is at the core of the new Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing working group under the leadership of Prof. Iryna Gurevych (UKP-DIPF) at the Frankfurt am Main location. The working group will cooperate closely with the Technology-based Assessment [2] and Information Management groups at DIPF, as well as with the Department of Computer Science (UKP-TUD [3], Prof. Iryna Gurevych) at the Technische Universität Darmstadt. It is part of a newly established institutional research priority for knowledge processing [4] at DIPF and the Technische Universität Darmstadt.

The position's focus will be on automatic improvement of scientific publications, for which methods from text mining, knowledge extraction from unstructured text, and automatic language processing will be researched. The goal of this research is the production of novel, eScience-based research possibilities and the establishment of a new research area for this topic. This will necessarily involve close cooperation with the practitioners of pedagogical research at DIPF.

Possible research topics in computer science include automatic linkage of textual documents, multi-document summarization, automatic recognition of topic structures and topic relations in scientific texts, analysis of opinions and trends in scientific literature, and automatic topic identification.

The competition is open to highly qualified PhD holders and excellent holders of other degrees working towards a leadership position and scientific career.

Requirements:

• a very good to excellent completed doctoral or other degree in computer science (in natural language processing or a related field)
• a good command of spoken and written English and at least basic knowledge of German
• experience in research in text analysis and machine learning
• the ability to program in Java
• the ability to work independently, personal commitment and teamwork skills, communication skills, and a readiness to cooperate

• outstanding scientific qualifications as evidenced by publications in leading conferences
• third-party funding and project management
• experience in the development and implementation of university courses

The position is a fixed-term contract with an option to extend it, provided certain conditions are met. We offer the possibility of further scientific qualification towards a doctoral degree or Habilitation at the Technische Universität Darmstadt. The salary is based on TV-H (the collective bargaining agreement for public employees in Hesse). A part-time working arrangement is possible.

As a scientific institution, the primary goals of the Leibniz Institute DIPF are high-profile basic research and innovative scientific services. Particular importance and visibility is attached to their application to education in the public sector. DIPF avails itself of the expertise of computer science at TU Darmstadt to build a research center for knowledge processing and educational computer science.

The Department of Computer Science of TU Darmstadt is regularly ranked among the best in Germany. Among the distinguishing features of the nascent UKP-DIPF working group are its expertise in semantic language technology, text mining, and information retrieval, as well as its powerful infrastructures for the aggregation and evaluation of knowledge.

_Contact_:
Applications (including CV, details of previous academic work, educational and professional references, and final thesis and/or three key publications in electronic form) should be submitted under reference no. IZB 2012-05 by April 12, 2012 to gurevych (at) cs (dot) tu-darmstadt (dot) de.

Applications submitted after the deadline may still be considered as long as the position remains unfilled.

[1] www.dipf.de/
[2] tba.dipf.de/
[3] www.ukp.tu-darmstadt.de/
[4] www.werc.tu-darmstadt.de/