Open PhD/Postdoc position at the DWS Group, Mannheim

A position is currently open for a (highly motivated) PhD student or early Postdoc at the Data and Web Science (DWS) Group at the University of Mannheim, Germany, starting this fall (2015).

She/he will work on a project on entity-centric information extraction for the finance domain. The project will involve close collaboration with a local company that develops financial software, and will proceed under the direction of Prof. S. Ponzetto and Prof. H. Stuckenschmidt.

The aim of the project is to design and test new user-centric NLP-based methodologies and services for the personalized extraction of financial entities, events and relations from heteregenous data sources (webpages, financial feeds, corporate databases).

Requirements:

The successful candidate must hold by the time of the appointment a MSc or PhD degree in computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, or computer science. She/he should have the following profile:

- Mandatory:
(1) hold by the time of the appointment a MSc or PhD degree in computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, or computer science,
(2) good software development skills in Java,
(3) knowledge of semantic web standards, resources and formalisms (SPARQL, OWL and RDF ontologies, first order logic, linked data), and/or databases (SQL),
(4) knowledge of machine learning and/or statistical NLP (POS tagging, NER, parsing, chunking, text classification).
- Nice to have:
(5) previous experience in either event extraction or recommendation systems
(6) Python and R, versioning systems, linux,
(7) constraint programming, (linear) optimization.

Language:

Good knowledge of English.

Duration:

The position is intially for 12 months, but will be extended for up to 4 years. It will start sometime from September-October 2015. Compensation will be competitive (3,000-4,000 euros gross per month) and based on qualifications and experience. There will be also substantial financial support for conference travel and international outreach.

Location:

The University of Mannheim, is located in Mannheim (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mannheim), in the heart of the Rhineland, close to the business hubs of Frankfurt and Stuttgart, the French border (Strasbourg) and Germany's prime wine region. It regularly ranks among the top German universities. The DWS group (http://dws.informatik.uni-mannheim.de/en/home/) is known internationally for its research in semantic technologies, NLP, machine learning, data mining and knowledge-based systems.

Deadline, contact:

We will consider applications on a rolling basis until a suitable candidate is found. If you are interested, please send a CV and a motivation letter to:
- heiner at informatik.uni-mannheim.de (H. Stuckenschmidt)
- camilo.thorne at gmail.com (C. Thorne)
(The University of Mannheim fosters equality of opportunities: minority and female applicants are encouraged to apply)