Postdoctoral Fellowship, Machine Translation

There are more than 103 million displaced persons in the world today. While English remains the global language of policy exchange and studies, significant knowledge on refugee issues appears in other languages spoken where forced migration occurs. Machine translation (MT) improves the accessibility of relevant publications across different languages and facilitates fair and inclusive discussion among international stakeholders. However, challenges with in-domain multilingual neural machine translation (MNMT) limits the availability of efficient, affordable and manageable MT with usable translation quality for forced migration responses.

The successful fellow will collaborate with Carleton University and the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford to create an in-domain multiway parallel corpus from the regular and special issues of the Forced Migration Review journal. This corpus will then enable research on MNMT and its adaptation to the refugee domain. Finally, the fellow will research on training MNMT to translate unseen languages efficiently with minimal resources.

Having compassion about refugees and forced migration issues and ease in meeting with the forced migration communities around the world would be beneficial in this role. Due to the topic of the project, the successful candidate may frequently be working on and with data and clients about refugees and forced migration issues which may cause triggering responses.

Education

PhD in Computer Science, Computational Linguistics or related discipline.

For information on certificates and diplomas issued abroad, please see Degree equivalency

Experience

• Hands on experience in end-to-end MT modeling and training.
• Research experience in MNMT.
• Research experience in parallel corpus building, domain adaptation, non-English centric MT or low resource MT.

Asset
Assets are “nice-to-have” expertise and competencies we’re interested in. Not having them should not prevent you from applying.

• Ability to read Arabic, French, Spanish, Russian, Ukrainian, Burmese or Pashto would be an asset.

Language Requirements

English

Information on language requirements and self-assessment tests

Condition of Employment

Reliability Status

Who is eligible?

• Fellowships will be for two years contingent on satisfactory progress achieved during the first year.
• Candidates should have obtained a PhD (or equivalent) within the past three years (PhD received on or after July 1, 2020) or expect to complete their PhD within 6 months of appointment.
• Fellows will work in a lab under the direct supervision of an NRC researcher.

Application Requirements

In order to be considered for the program please include the following in your application, please note that you will need to attach the required documents as per the list below when submitting your application. Failure to do so will result in your application being excluded from searches.

• Resume
• Statement of Interest in the project (maximum one page in length)
• PhD Transcript – an electronic copy is sufficient, it does not have to be an official version.
• List of Publications

When submitting your application you can include the required documents in any attachment field such as «Second language evaluation results» or «Other attachments»

In addition, applicants who best meet the requirements of the position will be asked to provide three letters of recommendation at a later stage of the competition process.

Relocation

Relocation assistance will be determined in accordance with the NRC’s directives.

Compensation

The intent of this hiring action is to staff through the Postdoctoral Fellowships Program at the RCO-2/AsRO level, which is an early-career level position with a salary range of $74,230 to $103,093.

NOTE: Salary determination will be based on a review of the candidate’s expertise, outcomes and impacts of their previous work experience relative to the requirements of the level. As a guide, the current annual PhD recruiting rate is $74,230.

NRC employees enjoy a wide-range of competitive benefits including comprehensive health and dental plans, pension and insurance plans, vacation and other leave entitlements.

Notes

• Fellowships are open to nationals of all countries, although preference will be given to Canadian Citizens and Permanent Residents of Canada. Please include citizenship information in your application.
• The incumbent must adhere to safe workplace practices at all times.
• We thank all those who apply, however only those selected for further consideration will be contacted.