[Job-offers-cs] Postdoctoral position in Machine Learning for Opinion Mining in Social Networks

[Pekka Orponen]

-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: [DMANET] Postdoctoral position in Machine Learning for Opinion 
Mining in Social Networks
Date: Mon, 25 Mar 2019 17:34:36 +0100
From: Benoit Gaüzère <benoit.gauzere at insa-rouen.fr>
To: dmanet at zpr.uni-koeln.de

Postdoctoral position in Machine Learning for Opinion Mining in Social 
Networks


The App (http://www.litislab.fr/equipe/app/) and MIND 
(http://www.litislab.fr/equipe/mind/) teams of the LITIS lab at INSA 
Rouen Normandy offer a postdoctoral position for 12 months as part of 
the SAPhIRS project.

Keywords: machine learning, deep learning, recurrent neural networks

Description of the project and postdoctoral missions:

Social networks are regularly used to express opinions on public and 
political events or to disseminate opinions on sensitive topics (hate 
speech, hooliganism, racism and nationalism, etc.). The objective of the 
SAPhIRS project is to study opinion propagation within social networks: 
to identify the key mechanisms for disseminating information and opinion 
and to identify leaders of influence. Particularly in Security field, we 
will focus on Twitter detection and analysis of hamessages calling for 
hatred or violence, monitoring their spread and detection of influential 
actors.

As part of this project, we propose a 12-month postdoctoral position in 
machine learning for opinion mining, sentiment analysis and the 
detection of changes of opinion in Tweets. For this purpose, we plan to 
use state-of-the-art methods in NLP based on deep-learning neural 
networks, and especially recurrent neural networks with internal memory 
such as LSTMs or GRUs.

In other words, the main tasks would be:

      To annotate tweets automatically according to an opinion: 
supervised classification problem;
      To automatically identify messages containing the expression of 
radical ideas, in English, in French and in Arabic chat alphabet 
(transliteration of Arabic in Latin alphabet, also called arabizi or 
arabish): problem of supervised learning on unbalanced classes and 
possibly weakly supervised learning;
      To detect changes of opinion in user Tweets sequences: detection 
of anomalies and breaks in a time series.

The main difficulties come from the encoding of input data (short texts 
from Twitter, in French and Arabizi) for which language models remain to 
be defined, and in the design and learning of adapted recurrent models 
dedicated to these three tasks.

Profiles:
Candidates must have a doctorate in Machine Learning with, if possible, 
experience in NLP and/or Deep Learning. Knowledge of recurrent networks 
and Arabizi would also be a plus.

Contractual conditions:
The contract will be 12 months starting as soon as possible, with a 
gross salary of approximately 3500 €. The recruited person will work in 
the LITIS lab at INSA Rouen Normandy in Saint-Etienne-du-Rouvray.

Application: CV, motivation letter, recommendation letters.

Contact: alexandre.pauchet at insa-rouen.fr