PhD position in Semantic Entity Search

The University of Stavanger invites applications for a three-year doctorate scholarship in Information Technology, at the Faculty of Science and Technology, in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, beginning September 1, 2014.

Project: Semantic Entity Search
Semantic search refers to the idea that the search engine understands the concepts, meaning and intent behind the query that the user enters into the search box, and provides rich and focused responses (as opposed to merely a list of documents). Entities, such as people, organizations or products, play a central role in this context; they reflect the way humans think and organize information. We can observe that major search engines (like Google or Apple’s SIRI) are becoming “smarter” day by day in recognizing specific types of objects (for example, locations, events or celebrities); yet, true semantic search has still a long way to go.
This project aims to develop a theoretically sound and computationally efficient framework for entity-oriented information access: the search and discovery of entities and relationships between entities. A key element to a successful approach is the combination of massive volumes of structured and unstructured information from the Document Web and the Data Web, respectively. Successful candidates will be expected to conduct research, design, develop, and deploy state-of-art, scalable information retrieval, information extraction and machine learning techniques for innovative entity-oriented search applications. The project will include both theoretical and empirical explorations, where lab-based results will be evaluated in ‘live’ environments with real users.

Qualifications: M.Sc. in Computer Science, Computational Linguistics, Mathematics or related fields by the appointment date. Good written and spoken command of English. Research experience or a track record of project based work, demonstrable interest in the domain, solid programming skills (particularly Java), and experience in manipulating and analyzing large data sets (esp. using Hadoop) are a clear plus.

The research fellow is salaried according to the State Salary Code, l.pl 17.515, code 1017, LR 20, ltr 50, of NOK 421 100,- per annum.

Details and application instructions can be found here.
Application deadline: January 11, 2014.

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