3 (RENEWABLE) 2-YEAR POST-DOC POSITIONS AVAILABLE The CIMeC-CLIC laboratory of the University of Trento, an interdisciplinary group of researchers studying language and conceptualization using both computational and cognitive methods (clic.cimec.unitn.it) announces the availability of at least 3 (renewable) 2-year Post-Doc positions. The scholarships are funded by a 5-year European Research Council Starting Grant awarded to the COMPOSES (COMPositional Operations in SEmantic SPACE) project (clic.cimec.unitn.it/composes), that aims at modeling composition in distributional semantics. The project is expected to have strong impact on both theoretical and computational semantics, as well as their cognitive underpinnings. * Desired Profiles * Given the interdisciplinary nature of the project, we seek brilliant researchers with any of the following backgrounds: - Machine learning (areas of special interest: regression, regularization methods, hierarchical regression, autoencoders, curriculum learning, scaling machine learning to large multivariate and multi-level problems, dealing with very sparse data); - Psycholinguistics, experimental linguistics or cognitive science (areas of special interest: systematic judgment elicitation methods such as Likert scales or magnitude estimation, crowdsourcing, semantic processing); - Formal and/or computational semantics (areas of special interest: Montague Grammar and its derivatives, distributional semantics) Advanced programming and mathematical skills are required of candidates from machine learning. Linguists and cognitive scientists must possess at least basic programming skills and a reasonable knowledge of statistics. If you think that your background is relevant to the research program outlined on the project website (clic.cimec.unitn.it/composes) and you have good programming and quantitative skills, please do get in touch even if you do not fit any of the profiles above. All researchers are expected to have an interest in working in an interdisciplinary environment. * The Research Environment * The CLIC lab (clic.cimec.unitn.it) is a unit of the University of Trento's Center for Mind/Brain Sciences (CIMeC, http://www.unitn.it/en/cimec), an English-speaking, interdisciplinary center for research in brain and cognition whose staff includes neuroscientists, psychologists, (computational) linguists, computer scientists and physicists. CLIC consists of researchers from the Departments of Computer Science (DISI) and Cognitive Science (DISCoF) carrying out research on a range of topics including concept acquisition, corpus-based computational semantics, combining NLP and computer vision, combining brain and corpus data to study cognition, formal semantics and theoretical linguistics. Modeling composition in distributional semantics is increasingly a focus point of CLIC, and activity in this area will grow considerably thanks to COMPOSES funds. CLIC is part of the larger network of research labs focusing on Natural Language Processing and related domains in the Trento region, that is quickly becoming one of the areas with the highest concentration of researchers in NLP and related fields anywhere in Europe. The CLIC/CIMeC laboratories are located in beautiful Rovereto, a lively town in the middle of the Alps, famous for its contemporary art museum, the quality of its wine, and the range of outdoors sport and relax opportunities it offers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rovereto * Application Information * For further information, please send an expression of interest to marco.baroni@unitn.it, attaching a CV. Positions are available immediately and open until filled.