Call for one PhD position

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Call for one PhD position on Multilingual Interactive Question Answering
at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano (Bolzano, Italy);
research project carried out jointly with Fondazione Bruno Kessler
(Trento, Italy).

Submission Deadline: 18th of October 2010

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Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK – Trento, Italy) and Free University of
Bozen-Bolzano (FUB – Bolzano, Italy) are seeking candidates for a
3-year PhD project on Multilingual Interactive Question Answering.

Interactive Question Answering systems require some understanding of the dialogue context and user needs to interact with end-users properly. The project aims at investigating how statistically based language technologies and logic based query answering methods over ontologies can be combined to achieve such an understanding. As a case study, the PhD project will build on top of the experience of the QALL-ME (http://qallme.fbk.eu) and OBDA@FUB (http://obda.inf.unibz.it/) projects.

In particular, the following directions will be investigated: (i) easy porting of the technologies over different domains; (ii) scalability of the technologies over large datasets (e.g., question answering over Wikipedia); (iii) extendibility over multiple languages and cross-language scenarios; (iv) design and implementation of principled techniques for modeling interaction, particularly in case of system failures.

The project will be jointly supervised by FBK (Research Unit on Human Language Technologies - http://hlt.fbk.eu/en/home) and FUB (KRDB Research Centre for Knowledge and Data - http://www.inf.unibz.it/krdb/).

The PhD studentship amounts roughly to 51,000 Euro over the three years. Substantial extra funding is available for participation in international conferences, schools, and workshops.

**Eligibility criteria**: Master’s degree (Laurea Specialistica), or Italian undergraduate degree from the old system, or a foreign degree equivalent to one of these degrees.

The ideal candidate should have a good background in Computational Logic and Computational Linguistics.