**Title**

Detecting intentions during crisis events

**Background and objectives**

Social media platforms offer great opportunities to identify public
commitments to intentions and desires/plans to act from user-generated
contents. Automatically detecting intentions can have many potential
applications, such as in commerce marketing (consumption intentions:
sell, purchase), security and defense (intention to attack, to connect
to terrorist organizations), health (intention to suicide), and
emergency management (intentions to help, evacuate). Mining intentions
from texts can thus help decision makers to differentiate between
intentional and non-intentional messages ("I want to buy this great
phone" vs."Trump won the US election") and to better identify the type
of intention behind each message which is a primordial step to help
companies, government, or institutions to better predict users' future
actions and thus improve their strategies.

The internship will focus on the development of an automatic intention
model on social media data which will foster the ability of public
services to take action quicker in crisis situations, by monitoring
user's expectations and intents.

The internship is funded by the French Interior Department (no French
citizenship required) within a joint project between Institut de
Recherche en informatique de Toulouse (IRIT-Toulouse University) and
Institut Jean Nicod (IJN-Ecole Normale Supérieure).

**Candidate profile**
The successful candidate will have one of the following profile:
- Msc or MA student in Computer Science, or Computational Linguistics.
- Experience in Natural Language Processing, and/or Machine Learning;

**Terms of the internship position**
- Duration: 5 months
- Starting date: from February to April 2019
- Location: IRIT, Toulouse University (France),

**Applications**
- A curriculum vitae together with a motivation letter should be sent to
Farah Benamara (farah.benamara@irit.fr), Véronique Moriceau
(veronique.moriceau@irit.fr) and Alda Mari (alda.mari29@gmail.com)
- Deadline for applications: position open until filled.