Call for Position: DTIC-PLCT-2023-69 - Research Support position: Research Support MdM – research support NLP for Sign Languages

Project description: 

Natural language processing of Sign Languages aims to analyse sequences of signs in order to, for example, associate lexical categories to signs or disambiguate them or establishing dependency relations between them to produce linguistically rich representations to support for example the identification of specific types of information in the SL stream of content (e.g. who did what to whom, when, and how). In general, non-visual representations of SLs have been adopted in order to support the above mentioned processes, that is symbolic, instead of video-based representations are used to further analyse the output of computer vision processes. Such representations could be automatically produced if high quality data-sets were available for training NLP approaches.

The position is linked to the research subproject Natural Language Processing for Sign Languages, within the Work Package “Architectures for Sign Languages”. The duration of these tasks is estimated over a period of 13 months.

Tasks to be performed:

Specifically, the position has the following objectives to work over 13 months in the Work Package “Architectures for Sign Languages”:

• Investigate current architectures for Sign Language Recognition (SLR) and adapt them to LSE and LSC datasets.
• Adopt hybrid approaches to Sign Language Translation (LSE - Spanish, LCS - Catalan. etc.): Combining Machine Learning and Linguistic Information.
• Management and implementation of the research project together with the PI and the timely presentation of the commitments of the sub-project "Natural Language Processing for Sign Languages' ' to the strategic research program of the unit. 
• Management of communication between the different researchers of the TALN group, as well as communication with other groups, departments and research units at UPF, and with the Planetary Wellbeing initiative, within the framework of the project.
• Publication of scientific articles and technical reports with research results. 
• Support the members of the research line, in particular doctoral students, in their daily communication, management and research activities.

Dedication and working hours: Full time (35h/week)

Planned remuneration approx: 27.841,78  € gross per year

Financing fund: Proyecto PRESP08722 - AEI - MDM-CEX2021-001195-M - DTIC - LOZANO, Angel - Unidades de Excelencia María de Maeztu - Departamento de Tecnologías de la Información y las Comunicaciones, financiado por MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033.

Entity: Ayuda PRESP08722 - AEI - MDM-CEX2021-001195-M - DTIC - LOZANO, Angel - Unidades de Excelencia María de Maeztu - Departamento de Tecnologías de la Información y las Comunicaciones financiada por MCIN/AEI/10.13039/501100011033.

This recruitment is financed by the Plan Estatal de Investigación Científica, Técnica y de Innovación 2021-2023.