Last application date Jul 15, 2024 00:00
Department LW22 - Department of Translation, Interpreting and Communication
Contract Limited duration
Degree You hold (or will obtain during the application period) a master’s degree in Artificial Intelligence, Engineering, Computational Linguistics or another relevant area.
Occupancy rate 100%
Vacancy type Research staff
The LT3 language and translation technology team at Ghent University has a full-time vacancy for a PhD researcher in the area of Natural Language Processing for research on building empathic conversational agents, funded by the Flemish Ministry of Economics, Science and Innovation in the framework of the Flemish AI research program (https://www.flandersairesearch.be/en).
Research group
The LT3 Language and Translation Technology Team is a dynamic research group at Ghent University's Department of Translation, Interpreting and Communication (https://lt3.ugent.be). The group conducts fundamental and applied research in the domain of language and translation technology and has extensive expertise in the use of machine learning for a wide range of language technology problems, int.al. anaphora resolution, irony detection, event detection, word sense disambiguation, sentiment and (multimodal) emotion detection, etc. The group has available a state of the art computing and experimentation infrastructure.
Project
As part of an ongoing initiative of the regional government to boost Artificial Intelligence in Flanders, an ambitious research program has been initiated (https://www.flandersairesearch.be/nl). In the work package on “Interaction and Cognitive Systems”, one of the goals is to simulate human dialogue in social context, allowing human-machine communication to be more effective and enjoyable for humans. Language models, powered by recent revolutions in AI, are becoming increasingly more powerful and support language generation, summarization, classification, question answering, chatbots and more. In this work, we will capitalize on recent developments in NLP build applications which focus on language and linguistic interaction, such as interactive learning with embodied agents. We will explore multimodal interaction, in which language is combined with other modalities, such as vision and tactile interaction to integrate paralinguistic cues such as prosody, gestures, affect and emotion. These will allow users to have interactions that transcend classic written conversations with interactive AI systems.
We look for a highly motivated PhD student who will be working in the LT3 team, but also in collaboration with the other research teams involved in the Flanders AI programme.
Job description
Profile and requirements
WHAT WE CAN OFFER YOU
Please send an extended CV and motivation letter to Veronique.Hoste@ugent.be, before the closing date of July 15, 2024, but preferably as soon as possible.
For questions about the profile and the description of the profile, you can mail to Veronique.hoste@ugent.be.
Ghent University is one of the top 100 universities in the Dutch language area, with more than 44,000 students and 15,000 staff members.
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