EUROPEAN COMMISSION JOINT RESEARCH CENTRE Resources Recruitment and Training 2015-IPR-G-000-5633 Position for: Trainee Terminology discovery in Disaster Risk Management for the UNISDR (Terminologist) Short description of activity: The European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) in Ispra, Italy, is looking for a trainee to work on a terminology project supporting a world-wide team of specialists lead by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNISDR). At the recent UN world conference in Sendai, Japan, 187 UN member states adopted a new 15-year framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) with seven targets and four priorities of action. The terms used in this framework must be defined clearly and unequivocally in order to achieve world-wide collaboration between scientists, policy makers, the private sector and practitioners in countries having a rather different DRR culture, different administrative procedures and speaking different languages. The overall objective of this terminology project is thus to review and update the existing defining UNISDR vocabulary available at http://www.unisdr.org/we/inform/publications/7817. During the last year, the JRC has gathered and analysed DRR- related text collections, definitions and term usage statistics, allowing DRR specialists to understand how the terms are used in real life in order to make informed decisions on how the terms should be defined and how they should be distinguished from other, similar terms. The JRC did this by analysing the gathered data using Language Technology tools and methods used in Computational Linguistics and Statistics. Results have been presented in text form, tables, using graphs and further methods for visualisation. The successful trainee is expected to: - continue and refine this work for English language; - to possibly expand it to Spanish and French language; - to use off-the-shelf software to automatically extract terms from the document collection and to manually curate the results; - to produce various types of statistics on the usage of terms in different sub-corpora; - to prepare data and results for the DRR subject domain specialists; - to prepare the meetings of expert teams; - to take minutes during the meetings; - to act upon the requests by the specialists of the expert teams and; - to summarise the discussions and the work carried out. Qualifications: The candidate should have a degree (or an almost completed degree) somehow related to disaster risk management, terminology, computational linguistics or computer science; (b) good knowledge of written and spoken English (B2 level); (c) good communication skills, ability to work independently and as part of a team: and (d) good knowledge of Information Technology-related tools and formats such as internet search engines, XML, word processing and spread sheets. Further advantageous skills are (e) knowledge of other European languages, especially Spanish and French; (f) experience with terminology and the preparation of definitions; and (g) knowledge of the field of DRR, Disaster Risk Management or similar areas and (h) some programming skills to process and handle large corpora, convert data formats, etc. In your application, please state your interests and please provide clear information on your skill set, by elaborating on the above-mentioned list of requirements and by listing your level of languages and your computer / programming skills. The Joint Research Centre (JRC; http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/jrc/) is the scientific-technical arm of the European Commission. The approximately 2200 JRC employees working in Ispra are from all EU countries and there are also some non-EU visitors. The working environment is multilingual, multi-cultural and multi-disciplinary. The JRC's Europe Media Monitor (EMM) team carries out research and development in the field of highly multilingual text mining (Language Technology; Computational Linguistics) for the purposes of media monitoring. EMM gathers an average of over 200,000 online news articles per day in over 70 languages and analyses them to help its large international user community understand and use this enormous amount of media information. EMM is publicly accessible via http://emm.newsbrief.eu/overview.html. See also https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/research-topic/internet-surveillance- systems and https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/language-technologies. For general eligibility requirements, please read the rules governing the traineeship scheme of the JRC: https://ec.europa.eu/jrc/en/working-with-us/jobs/temporary-positions/jrc-trainees duration 5 months Preferred starting date As soon as possible Application: http://recruitment.jrc.ec.europa.eu/