The University of Stavanger invites applications for a fully funded PhD position.
Intelligent personal assistants and chatbots (such as Siri, Cortana, the Google Assistant, and Amazon Alexa) are being used increasingly more for different purposes, including information access and retrieval. These conversational agents differ from traditional search engines in several important ways. They enable more naturalistic human-like interactions, where search becomes a dialog between the user and the machine. Unlike in traditional search engines, where a user-issued query is answered with a search result page, conversational agents can respond in a variety of ways, for example, asking questions back to the user for clarification.
The successful candidate will work on the design, development, and evaluation of conversational search systems. In particular, the candidate is expected to employ and develop deep learning techniques for understanding natural language requests and generating appropriate responses.
The candidate is required to have a background in machine learning or information retrieval.
For detailed information about the PhD position and the application process, please see here. Remember to specify topic #7 Conversational AI for information access and retrieval as your preference.
Application deadline: February 27, 2018