Postdoctoral Fellowship, Machine Translation

Priority may be given to the following designated employment equity groups: women, Indigenous peoples* (First Nations, Inuit and Métis), persons with disabilities and racialized persons*.
 

* The Employment Equity Act, which is under review, uses the terminology Aboriginal peoples and visible minorities. 
 

City: Ottawa 

Organizational Unit: Digital Technologies 

Classification: RO 

Tenure: Term 

Duration: 2 Years

Language Requirements: English

Note: Due to the nature of the work and operational requirements, this position will require some physical presence at the NRC work location identified in the form of a hybrid work arrangement (a combination of working onsite and offsite).

Great Minds. One Goal. Canada's Success.

The National Research Council of Canada (NRC) is the Government of Canada's largest research organization supporting industrial innovation, the advancement of knowledge and technology development. We collaborate with over 70 colleges, universities and hospitals annually, work with 800 companies on their projects, and provide advice or funding to over 8000 Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) each year.

We bring together the brightest minds to deliver tangible impacts on the lives of Canadians and people around the world. And now, we want to partner with you.  Let your expertise and inspirations make an impact by joining the NRC.

At the NRC, we know that diversity enables excellence in research and innovation. We are committed to a diverse and representative workforce, a safe and respectful work environment, and contributing to a more inclusive Canadian innovation system.  We welcome all qualified applicants and encourage you to complete the employment equity self-declaration questions during the job application process.

Please let us know of any accommodation measures required to help you to be assessed in a fair and equitable manner. Please note that the information you provide will be treated confidentially. 

The NRC’s Postdoctoral Fellowship program offers PDFs access to unique world-class facilities and the opportunity to work alongside multi-disciplinary teams of expert researchers and technicians on projects of critical importance to Canada. PDFs will carry out research on innovative research projects, with opportunities for career development (publications and/or industry interaction).

PDFs will be offered appointments to the staff of the National Research Council on a term basis and will be offered salaries and benefits currently available to Research Officers. Salaries commensurate with experience are taxable and subject to other deductions. As a guide, the current annual PhD recruiting rate is $74,230. In addition PDFs will be allocated a travel fund to support their work.

Multilingual Machine Translation for Transforming Response to Refugees and Forced Migration 

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.
 

PhD in Computer Science, Computational Linguistics or related discipline. 

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

•    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, Spanish, Russian, Ukrainian, Burmese or Pashto would be an asset.
 

English

Information on language requirements and self-assessment tests

Reliability Status

• 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.

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

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.

• 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.

Please direct your questions, with the requisition number (18905) to:

E-mail: [email protected]

Telephone : 343-552-7798

Closing Date: 27 March 2023 - 23:59 Eastern Time 

For more information on career tools and other resources, check out Career tools and resources

*If you are currently a term or continuing employee at NRC, please apply through the SuccessFactors Careers module from your NRC computer.