TEXT MINING RESEARCH POSITION

One Research Associate is required for an EC 6th Framework Information Society Technologies collaborative project entitled: Bootstrapping of Ontologies and Terminologies (www.bootstrep.eu) The project aims at building reusable wide-coverage lexical, conceptual and factual knowledge resources for the biology domain, to support text mining. This involves both exploiting existing terminological resources and automatically acquiring new terms and concepts and associated linguistic information from the vast amount of literature.

The main functions of the Research Associate are to work in relevant aspects of natural language processing, text mining, machine learning, terminology and ontological engineering, including:

• Gathering, normalising and categorising terminologies from bioinformatics databases and linking them to textual resources using automated text mining means
• Populating a bio-lexicon using a combination of machine learning based text mining techniques
• Populating a bio-ontology using a combination of lexical and statistical methods
• The software infrastructure needed for text analysis which will allow ease of integration of components, pipelining of components and definition of workflows in a GRID environment

The duration of the post is 24 months from 1st June 2006 or asap after this date. Salary will be within the range of £20,842 - £30,607 per annum

The successful candidate will work closely with the National Centre for Text Mining (http://www.nactem.ac.uk) and with researchers from the Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre (http://www.mib.ac.uk).

Applicants must have a postgraduate degree (preferably a PhD) or equivalent research experience with emphasis in text mining or a related topic. Candidates should also have a good working knowledge of natural language processing and good programming skills. Knowledge of ontologies or machine learning techniques would be an advantage.

If you are interested in applying please contact Dr Sophia Ananiadou for further details on +44 (0)161 306 3092 or email Sophia.Ananiadou@manchester.ac.uk

Dr Sophia Ananiadou
Reader in Text Mining, School of Informatics, University of Manchester
Deputy director, National Centre for Text Mining
http://www.nactem.ac.uk
http://personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/sophia.ananiadou/
Tel: +44 161 306 3092