[DL] One PhD position on Multilingual Interactive Question Ansering (FUB-FBK, Italy)

[Diego Calvanese]

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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 at 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.


**Deadline**: Applications should arrive by the 18th of October 2010.

Further information on the application procedure can be found at:
http://www.unibz.it/en/public/research/phd/prospectivePhdstudents.html
(click on "Public Competition Announcement for PhD courses - 26th
cycle" to download the call).


We invite applicants to get in touch with the research groups as soon
as possible (see Contact Persons below), in order to have a better
understanding of the possible research activities in which the
applicants may be involved.

Contact Persons:
Bernardo Magnini - Fondazione Bruno Kessler (magnini at fbk.eu),
Raffaella Bernardi – Free Univ. of Bozen-Bolzano (bernardi at inf.unibz.it)
Diego Calvanese – Free Univ. of Bozen-Bolzano (calvanese at inf.unibz.it)