Traineeship at the European Commission’s eTranslation NLP project Registrations are open until 31 January 2023 for 5-month paid Blue Book traineeships at the European Commission starting in October 2023. Are you interested in machine translation, natural language processing and artificial intelligence? If you have the basic technical skills needed to explore these, there will be an exciting new opportunity to work with the eTranslation team in Luxembourg as a Blue Book trainee in the Translation Traineeship category. You would be involved in applying data science and artificial intelligence/machine learning tools and techniques – maybe even using a supercomputer – for our flagship neural machine translation system and other natural language processing services.
Open to all EU citizens, regardless of age. A limited number of places are also allocated to non-EU nationals. Open to university graduates of at least 3 years of study. Deadline: 31 January 2023. Make sure to select the “Translation Traineeship” option to be eligible for this post. Apply here: https://traineeships.ec.europa.eu/ eTranslation: https://language-tools.ec.europa.eu/ GENERAL PRESENTATION We are the sector working on machine translation and other forms of natural language processing (NLP), within the information technology unit at the European Commission’s Directorate General for Translation (DG Translation), the world’s largest translation service. We build and run the eTranslation machine translation service, a flagship artificial intelligence project for the European Institutions that is also available to a broad range of external users everywhere in Europe. eTranslation plays a key role as an enabler of multilingualism in Europe, as a public service that facilitates multilingual communication in many different contexts, including on online platforms such as the Conference on the Future of Europe website or in difficult situations such as the influx of refugees in the context of the Ukrainian crisis. In addition to machine translation, we also provide services for other forms of natural language processing, including speech transcription, document classification, named entity recognition, and anonymization, and we continue to add new NLP services. We use AI techniques involving deep learning approaches and tools to train our own models, with large volumes of both internal and external data, or to deploy open-source pre-trained models. We work in a cloud environment, in Azure, and use infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) cloud services to develop and deliver our services to our internal and external users. We also carry out special projects involving the use of supercomputing/HPC resources for research and development relating to our services. JOB PRESENTATION As a trainee, your main task will be to contribute to the ongoing activities relating to the development of the eTranslation machine translation system or of our other services for natural language processing. You may work on tasks relating to the preparation of training data or to training models, or you may contribute to adjustments in our work processes to keep up with the fast pace of technological change in the field of natural language processing. You may participate in new explorations relating to potential new use cases for artificial intelligence/machine learning at DG Translation, which may also become candidates for new services within the eTranslation family of services. That may involve exploring and trying specific techniques or existing open-source toolkits or pre-trained models and making concrete proposals or building demos for how to use them for very practical purposes. You may also participate in and contribute to ongoing research and development projects involving supercomputing/HPC resources or to preparations for future such projects. You will have a mentor and you will work with other members of the eTranslation team who are experts in natural language processing, artificial intelligence and machine learning, data science, and cloud computing. You will receive regular feedback from your colleagues. You will have access to the training opportunities provided by DG Translation, including on the functioning of DG Translation and of the EU Institutions, but you will also have to be highly self-motivated to do independent explorations and learning relating to advanced state-of-the-art techniques and tools for natural language processing. LANGUAGE(S) NEEDED English DESIRED PROFILE We seek a motivated trainee with a background in a technical field relevant for machine translation or other forms of natural language processing, artificial intelligence/machine learning, data science, or cloud computing, and the necessary technical skills for engaging in or contributing to practical work in such fields. The ideal trainee should have a sense of responsibility, be able to respect deadlines and have a drive to learn new skills. We give preference to candidates with a master’s degree. A university degree in a technical field relevant for machine translation or other forms of natural language processing, artificial intelligence/machine learning, data science, or cloud computing is required. Experience of working on systems for machine translation or other forms of natural language processing is not mandatory, but it would be an asset. Experience of working or living in a multicultural environment is a plus.
