PhD positions: Interactive Storytelling, Mining of User Generated Content

Two open PhD positions towards a PhD in Engineering Computer Science at KU Leuven, Belgium. Each position is financed for 4 years by prestigious projects. One position is in the domain of mining and linking user generated content financed by the IWT-SBO project PARIS (IWT-SBO-110067). The other position regards the bringing to life of textual stories and instructions in a virtual reality and is sponsored by the MUSE project (EU FP7-296703 Future and Emerging Technologies).

For more information, visit www.cs.kuleuven.be/groups/liir/jobs.php

Machine Understanding for interactive StorytElling
Description: We have an open PhD position in the frame of the European MUSE (Machine Understanding for interactive StorytElling) project. MUSE will introduce a new way of exploring and understanding information by "bringing text to life" through 3D interactive storytelling. Taking as input natural language text like children's stories or medical patient education materials, MUSE will process the natural language, translate it into formal knowledge that represents the actions, actors, plots and surrounding world, and then render these as virtual 3D worlds in which the user can explore the text through interaction, re-enactment and guided game play.

The PhD student will study advanced natural language processing techniques that enable the translation of natural language text to the necessary knowledge representation based on probabilistic models of translation, latent class paraphrasing models, and automatic methods for acquiring world knowledge from large corpora. He or she will work in a team of senior researchers on these topics. The student will collaborate with outstanding European groups in the domains of machine reading of text, knowledge representation, cognitive understanding, and virtual storytelling.

The interested candidate is asked to submit his or her CV and motivation letter to Marie-Francine Moens ( Sien.Moens@cs.kuleuven.be ) and Steven Bethard ( Steven.Bethard@cs.kuleuven.be ) before May 21, 2012.

User generated content, e.g. available through social networking sites on the Web, offers a wealth of information. The aim of the IWT-SBO project PARIS (Personalized AdveRtisements buIlt fom web Sources), by which the PhD is sponsored, is to study adequate natural language, image and video understanding techniques that mine user generated content. This is challenging as user generated content is often present in language that is not well-formed or in visual material that is not professionally captured. An important application of the PARIS technologies will be personalized advertising, where relevant advertisements are searched and generated that fit the world of living recognized in the user generated content. This requires efficient and scalable methods of "machine understanding" of content that can be applied in an online setting.

The offered PhD position regards the mining and linking of user generated content focusing on the joint processing of text and visual data (collaboration with a computer vision group). The focus is on developing information extraction methods that learn with a minimum of human supervision and that combine uncertain evidences from different sources making use of advanced probabilistic inference methods. An additional focus is to make the methods scalable and efficient for real-time use. The PARIS project is executed in collaboration with KU Leuven ESAT-Visics (Prof. Luc Van Gool, Prof. Tinne Tuytelaars), KU Leuven HCI (Prof. Erik Duval), the Computational Web Intelligence group of Ghent University (Prof. Martine De Cock), the Language and Translation Technology Team of HoGent (Prof. Veronique Hoste), the International and European Legal Studies Programme of the University of Antwerp (Prof. Patrick Van Eecke) and the Vlerick Leuven Gent Management School (Prof. Steve Muylle).

The interested candidates is asked to submit his or her CV and motivation letter to Marie-Francine Moens ( Sien.Moens@cs.kuleuven.be ) before May 21, 2012.