Received from See-Kiong Ng, 18 April 2006

2 Postdoctoral Research Positions National Institute of Informatics, Japan

The National Institute of Informatics (NII) invites applications for two researchers at the postdoctoral level in the field of information extraction and text mining (major application areas are biology and medicine). The positions have a minimum duration of one year (until end of March 2007) with a possibility of extension to three years and can be filled immediately. Salary and conditions are calculated according to qualifications based on the NII standard pay scale.

In the BioCaster project our work focuses on developing and integrating natural language processing modules for extracting information related to disease outbreaks from general news texts for information access by public health experts. Skills in one or more of the following areas are necessary: text mining, computational linguistics, natural language processing and knowledge engineering. Familiarity with the biomedical domain will be an advantage.

The posts:

(1) The first post is focused on ontology/terminology engineering and will contribute to the creation of a multilingual database of terminology for describing disease outbreaks. The project will involve exploiting existing terminological and ontological resources as well as liaising with cooperating groups in Japan, Thailand and Vietnam.

(2) The second position will contribute to the creation of a text mining system for understanding disease outbreaks in news texts including the development and integration of language technology for information extraction.

NII offers an attractive and stimulating working environment in a state-of-the-art building. We are located close to the Imperial palace in the centre of Tokyo. Our team enjoys a pleasant working atmosphere and we strive for high international research standards.

The positions require a PhD and are available now and will remain open until filled. Interested applicants should send an email and their CV to the address below. Informal enquiries are also welcome.

Nigel Collier
Associate Professor
National Institute of Informatics
2-1-2 Hitotsubashi, Chiyoda-ku
Tokyo 101-8430
email: collier@nii.ac.jp
URL: http://research.nii.ac.jp/~collier