Junior Research Engineer in Natural Language Processing

We are currently exploring how we can make recent advances in NLP accessible to the Swiss media industry.  Most models in natural language processing (NLP) show the best performance for English since, traditionally, research questions are addressed first for English texts. Besides, most available data sets are in English. This has led to a considerable performance gap between NLP methods for English and other languages. The media landscape of Switzerland offers a unique opportunity to advance the state-of-the-art in multilingual NLP research: Despite its small size, Switzerland has four official national languages and a variety of strong dialects that are used in written and oral communication.

Together with experienced researchers (Postdocs), you will research and develop software prototypes for new media technologies, specifically focusing on natural language processing projects. You will be working on projects such as multilingual summarization of articles, tools for automatic translation of journalistic content into different languages or text classification. In your first project you will be working on emotion and stance detection in German text. This technology has many important applications from moderating online conversations towards a pluralistic discourse to automatically building article portfolios about important topics. You will have the opportunity to participate in the decision-making of key aspects of the project while being responsible for implementing and testing state-of-the-art research into software prototypes.

The initial employment contract will be for 6 months. After this period the temporary contract will be renewed annually.

• Must hold a master's degree or a diploma from a university of applied sciences. Relevant fields: computer science, data science, electrical engineering, etc.
• Strong background in natural language processing / computer linguistics. Publications (e.g. from your Master thesis) in venues such as ACL, EMNLP, NeurIPS, ICML, ICLR are a plus.
• Excellent programming skills, preferably in Python
• Familiarity with Tensorflow/Pytorch, Keras
• Proficiency in written and verbal communication in English
• Speaking one of the national languages of Switzerland is a plus: German, French, Italian, Romansh

ETH Zurich is one of the world’s leading universities specialising in science and technology. We are renowned for our excellent education, cutting-edge fundamental research and direct transfer of new knowledge into society. Over 30,000 people from more than 120 countries find our university to be a place that promotes independent thinking and an environment that inspires excellence. Located in the heart of Europe, yet forging connections all over the world, we work together to develop solutions for the global challenges of today and tomorrow.

We look forward to receiving your application with the following documents:

• Cover letter: a short (one page or less) statement of your motivation for joining the center
• CV 
• University degree(s) & transcripts (grades)

You can find more information about the Media Technology Center on our website, www.mtc.ethz.ch. For more information about the position, contact Dr. Severin Klingler by email at severin.klingler@inf.ethz.ch (no applications).