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The Internship Program in Computational Linguistics is devoted to training students for the creation and development of linguistic resources (dictionaries, grammars, knowledge bases, translation memories and corpora) for UNL-driven projects. The participation is open to students enrolled in any undergraduate or graduate program in the field of Languages, Linguistics, Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing in Switzerland and abroad, and may be pursued from distance (online) or at the UNDL Foundation office in Geneva.

During the internship program, interns are expected to work on specific projects, proposed, coordinated and supervised by the UNDL Foundation, and may choose one or several of the following activities:

• To create dictionary entries
• To create grammar entries
• To create knowledge base entries
• To create translation memory entries
• To create corpus in UNL

These activities are expected to be developed for the intern’s native language or other languages (including dead languages and sign languages) mastered by the intern. All the activities will be carried out online at the UNLarium, a web-based integrated development environment for creating and editing language resources for natural language engineering (available at www.unlweb.net/unlarium). The UNDL Foundation will provide all the necessary training and academic support for any of the tasks to be performed during the intern program.

Candidates must be enrolled in any undergraduate or graduate program in the field of Languages, Linguistics, Computational Linguistics, Natural Language Processing or Translation Studies. No previous experience in Computational Linguistics is required. But candidates must also have been approved in CLEA250, CLEA500, CLEA750, CUP250 and CUP500. These certificates may be pursued online at VALERIE – the Virtual Learning Environment for UNL – available at www.unlweb.net/valerie. Additional certificates may be required to perform more advanced tasks.

Application is based in specific calls for participation, which will mention the number of places, target languages, remuneration and other conditions of the internship program.

The duration of the internship program is of 3 (three) months, extendable to other 3 (three) months, depending on the evaluation of the performance of the intern.

The internship program may be pursued from distance (online) or at the UNDL Foundation office in Geneva, Switzerland. In any case, the UNDL Foundation will not pay or reimburse any expense that interns may have concerning the internship, including infrastructure (hardware, software, power supply, internet connection, internet provider, etc.) and logistic support (printing material, phone calls, lodging, transportation, etc.).

Interns will be remunerated according to their level and to the amount of UNLdots accumulated in the period of one calendar month. The payment will be done according to the rules available at our Terms and Conditions. The UNDL Foundation will make no deductions from any of the payments due to interns, who will be personally responsible for any and all taxes and other payments due on payments received.

The UNDL Foundation will issue a CERTIFICATE OF INTERNSHIP, upon evaluation, for those who have accomplished the tasks defined in the internship contract. Those interested in validating the internship program as academic credits must verify whether this possibility is supported by their academic institution. In any case, the UNDL Foundation has a legal framework to sign agreements with academic institutions, if necessary to be accredited as an official internship program partner.

The UNDL Foundation is a non-profit organization based in Geneva, Switzerland, which has received, from the United Nations, the mandate for implementing the Universal Networking Language (UNL). The UNL is an artificial language that has been used for several different tasks in natural language engineering, such as machine translation, multilingual document generation, summarization, information retrieval and semantic reasoning. It has been, since 1996, a unique initiative to reduce language barriers and strengthen cross-cultural communication in the framework of the UN.

For further information, please contact:
Ronaldo Martins
Language Resources Manager
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