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Have you recently completed or expect very soon an MSc or equivalent degree in computer science, artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, engineering, or a related area? Are you interested in carrying out research on automatic translation during the next few years? Are you excited to spend a part of your life in a pleasant city in the heart of the Italian Alps?

WE ARE LOOKING FOR YOU!!!

The Machine Translation https://ict.fbk.eu/units/hlt-mt/ (MT) group at Fondazione Bruno Kessler (Trento, Italy) in conjunction with the ICT International Doctorate School of the University of Trento https://iecs.unitn.it/ is pleased to announce the availability of the following fully-funded PhD position:

TITLE: Integrative Machine Translation

DESCRIPTION:

The advent of foundation models has introduced unprecedented opportunities in all areas of natural language processing. Automatic translation (be it speech or text translation) is no exception, with a wide variety of language directions, domains and application scenarios whose coverage is no longer a mere utopia. Although conditions today are more favourable than in the past, open challenges still exist in terms of fully exploiting the power of the available models, increasing their flexibility to integrate diverse input types, or constraining the output to meet specific application requirements. Open questions include: how to feed non-symbolic models with symbolic information describing the context of a translation request? How to supply meta-information about target users? How to integrate model capabilities with external information from structured knowledge bases? How to condition the output to specific target applications? This PhD aims to explore state-of-the-art solutions to tackle these challenges, with a special focus on the integration of multimodal information (e.g. contextual information supplied as visual cues), user-specific constraints (e.g. for gender/formality control), and application-specific constraints (e.g. structural requirements as in the case of video subtitling).

CONTACTS: negri@fbk.eu, bentivo@fbk.eu

COMPLETE DETAILS AVAILABLE AT:

https://iecs.unitn.it/education/admission/call-for-application

IMPORTANT DATES:

The deadline for application is May 30, 2023, hrs. 04:00 PM (CEST)

Prospective candidates are strongly invited to contact us in advance for preliminary interviews. Depending on the short time remaining before the application deadline, precedence for interviews will be given to short-listed candidates that will send us a complete CV via email ( negri@fbk.eu, bentivo@fbk.eu) by May 25, 2022.

Candidate profile

The ideal candidate must have recently completed or expect very soon an MSc or equivalent degree in computer science, artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, engineering, or a closely related area. In addition, the applicant should:

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Have an interest in Machine and Speech Translation -

Have experience in deep learning and machine learning, in general -

Have good programming skills in Python and experience in PyTorch -

Enjoy working with real-world problems and large data sets -

Have good knowledge of written and spoken English -

Enjoy working in a closely collaborating team

Working Environment

The doctoral student will be employed at the MT group at Fondazione Bruno Kessler, Trento, Italy. The group (about 10 people including staff and students) has a long tradition in research on machine and speech translation and is currently involved in several projects. Former students are nowadays employed in leading IT companies in the world.

Benefits

Fondazione Bruno Kessler offers an attractive benefits package, including a flexible work week, full reimbursement for conferences and summer schools, a competitive salary, an excellent team of supervisors and mentors, help with housing, full health insurance, the possibility of Italian courses, and sporting facilities.

Further Information

For preliminary interviews, and should you need further information about the position, please contact Matteo Negri (negri@fbk.eu) and Luisa Bentivogli (bentivo@fbk.eu).

Best Regards,

Matteo Negri