Hi there, 

Could you please distribute the following job offer? Thanks. 

Best, 

Pascal 

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We invite applications for a 3-year PhD position co-funded by Inria, 
the French national research institute in Computer Science and Applied 
Mathematics, and LexisNexis France, leader of legal information in 
France and subsidiary of the RELX Group. 

The overall objective of this project is to develop an automated 
system for detecting argumentation structures in French legal 
decisions, using recent machine learning-based approaches (i.e. deep 
learning approaches). In the general case, these structures take the 
form of a directed labeled graph, whose nodes are the elements of the 
text (propositions or groups of propositions, not necessarily 
contiguous) which serve as components of the argument, and edges are 
relations that signal the argumentative connection between them (e.g., 
support, offensive). By revealing the argumentation structure behind 
legal decisions, such a system will provide a crucial milestone 
towards their detailed understanding, their use by legal 
professionals, and above all contributes to greater transparency of 
justice. 

The main challenges and milestones of this project start with the 
creation and release of a large-scale dataset of French legal 
decisions annotated with argumentation structures. To minimize the 
manual annotation effort, we will resort to semi-supervised and 
transfer learning techniques to leverage existing argument mining 
corpora, such as the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) corpus, as 
well as annotations already started by LexisNexis. Another promising 
research direction, which is likely to improve over state-of-the-art 
approaches, is to better model the dependencies between the different 
sub-tasks (argument span detection, argument typing, etc.) instead of 
learning these tasks independently. A third research avenue is to find 
innovative ways to inject the domain knowledge (in particular the rich 
legal ontology developed by LexisNexis) to enrich enrich the 
representations used in these models. Finally, we would like to take 
advantage of other discourse structures, such as coreference and 
rhetorical relations, conceived as auxiliary tasks in a multi-tasking 
architecture. 

The successful candidate holds a Master's degree in computational 
linguistics, natural language processing, machine learning, ideally 
with prior experience in legal document processing and discourse 
processing. Furthermore, the candidate will provide strong programming 
skills, expertise in machine learning approaches and is eager to work 
at the interplay between academia and industry. 

The position is affiliated with the MAGNET [1], a research group at 
Inria, Lille, which has expertise in Machine Learning and Natural 
Language Processing, in particular Discourse Processing. The PhD 
student will also work in close collaboration with the R&D team at 
LexisNexis France, who will provide their expertise in the legal 
domain and the data they have collected. 

Applications will be considered until the position is filled. However, 
you are encouraged to apply early as we shall start processing the 
applications as and when they are received. Applications, written in 
English or French, should include a brief cover letter with research 
interests and vision, a CV (including your contact address, work 
experience, publications), and contact information for at least 2 
referees. Applications (and questions) should be sent to Pascal Denis 
([email protected]). 

The starting date of the position is 1 November 2022 or soon 
thereafter, for a total of 3 full years. 


Best regards, 

Pascal Denis 

[1] https://team.inria.fr/magnet/ 
[2] https://www.lexisnexis.fr/ 


-- 
Pascal 

---- 
Pour une évaluation indépendante, transparente et rigoureuse ! 
Je soutiens la Commission d'Évaluation de l'Inria. 
---- 

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 
Pascal Denis 
Equipe MAGNET, INRIA Lille Nord Europe 
Bâtiment B, Avenue Heloïse 
Parc scientifique de la Haute Borne 
59650 Villeneuve d'Ascq 
Tel: ++33 3 59 35 87 24 
Url: http://researchers.lille.inria.fr/~pdenis/ 
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 
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