The research group of Theoretical Computational Linguistics at the Institute for Natural Language Processing at the University of Stuttgart has an opening for a PhD candidate to work in emotion recognition in natural language. The candidate will be advised by Sebastian Padó and Roman Klinger.
The successful candidate will develop methods to identify associations of text phrases with
different emotions. This task can be addressed as a structured machine learning task, taking
multi- and cross-lingual aspects into account. The main application domain is the support of
literature studies by assigning emotions to characters in narrative texts.
The position is available in the context of CRETA (Center for Reflected Text Analytics) to be
funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). The goal of the newly established
center is to collectively develop, test and use methods for reflected text analysis across
text-oriented disciplines. It involves linguistics, literary studies, philosophy, history and
social sciences on the one hand and computer science/visualisation and natural language
processing/computational linguistics on the other. The center will focus on methodological building
blocks that are or can be used in more than one discipline and that will allow critically reflected
insights into the topics under investigation. It expects participants on the humanities side to
strive towards formalizing research questions and integrating quantitative analysis; participants
on the computer science side are expected to work towards transparency, interpretability and
justifications for automatic predictions.
The candidate for the position should have the following qualifications:
* excellent Master’s degree in computer science or computational linguistics
* advanced knowledge of machine learning methods
* strong programming skills in object-oriented and scripting languages
* advanced knowledge of natural language processing
* excellent communication skills and interest in interdisciplinary work
The following skills will be considered as a plus:
* Knowledge of probabilistic graphical models or artificial neural networks
* Knowledge of distributional semantics
* Experience with digital humanities research questions and contexts
* Knowledge of the German language
The position will be available for three years, starting from January 2016 (subject to final
funding confirmation) and open until filled. All applications received until 30th of November 2015
will receive full consideration. The salary is according to the German university payscale (TV-L
13, 66%) and amounts to about 2.300 EUR per month in the first year (pre-taxes), see
here for details.
To apply, please send a full CV and letter of motivation in one PDF document to Roman Klinger
(klinger@ims.uni-stuttgart.de).