PhD Studentship in Interactive Question Answering

PhD Studentship in Interactive Question Answering
(£12,000 per year)
Closing date: 16th Jan 2009
http://clg.wlv.ac.uk/jobs/

The Research Group in Computational Linguistics, University of Wolverhampton invites applications for a three-year-funded PhD studentship in Computational Linguistics. The successful candidate is expected to carry out research in the domain of interactive question answering. We are looking for candidates with a good degree in Computational Linguistics, Linguistics, Computer Science or Information Sciences, with programming skills and some experience in Natural Language Processing. The studentship is part funded by Unilever.

Required skills:

• degree in Computational Linguistics, Linguistics, Computer Science or Information Sciences
• experience with at least one of the following: Java, Perl, C++, .NET
• experience in Natural Language Processing
• good command of the English language

Desirable skills:

• Master's degree in Computational Linguistics, Linguistics, Computer Science or Information Sciences
• experience in question answering, information extraction and/or dialogue systems
• familiarity with a wide range of programming environments and operating systems

Applications should be sent to

Dr. Constantin Orasan
Research Institute of Information and Language Processing
University of Wolverhampton
Stafford St.
Wolverhampton
WV1 1SB
United Kingdom
E-mail: C.Orasan@wlv.ac.uk

and must include:

• completed application form available from http://clg.wlv.ac.uk/jobs/PhD-application.pdf
• CV
• copy of university degree (in English)
• copy of transcript listing all university marks (in English)
• evidence of postgraduate qualification if applicable
• a covering letter in which candidates explain why they have applied for the studentship, give details of their research interests/experience, background, programming skills and an outline of
• any experience in Natural Language Processing or Linguistics.

Applications should be made both by email and surface mail. The closing date for applications is 16th January 2009. The short-listed applicants will be interviewed by email and telephone in the week beginning 26th January 2009.

The studentship includes a maintenance grant of 12,000 GBP a year and also covers the tuition fees for 3 years.

The successful candidate is expected to start as soon as possible after 1st February 2009. She or he will be working in a vibrant research environment, engaging in active research. The studentship is part-funded by Unilever.

Established by Prof. Mitkov in 1998, the Research Group in Computational Linguistics is a highly successful one, delivering cutting-edge research in a number of NLP areas such as anaphora resolution, automatic summarisation, question answering, lexical knowledge acquisition, text categorisation, named entity recognition, information extraction, corpus construction and annotation, automatic terminology processing, multilingual processing, and multiple-choice question generation. To a large extent, this research has been undertaken in projects funded by major UK funding bodies and commercial partners. The recent UK Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) results have confirmed the Research Group in Computational Linguistics as one of the top research performers in the UK.

PostDoctoral Research Associate, Open University, UK

Natural Language Generation group

(http://mcs.open.ac.uk/nlg/)

Centre for Research in Computing
(http://crc.open.ac.uk)
The Open University, UK

"CODA - COherent Dialogue Automatically generated from text"

Position based in Milton Keynes, UK (40 minutes from central London by train) Duration: 2 years (Full-time) Expected start date: March 1, 2009

*** Project Overview:

The Department of Computing at The Open University (OU) has recently been awarded research funds by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) to develop the theory and technology for automatic transformation of text in monologue form to information-delivering dialogue, specifically dialogue between a 'layman' (e.g., patient or student) and an 'expert' (e.g., doctor or tutor).

The project will include construction of a parallel corpus of monologues and dialogues that express the same information. The corpus will be employed to develop and implement a system for mapping spans of text in monologue form to dialogue. For example, a text describing when and how to take a medicine may be transformed into the text of a dialogue between a patient and pharmacist. The aim is for the text in dialogue form to present the same information as the original text, but in a more memorable and engaging way.

In collaboration with the visiting researcher to the project, Dr. Prendinger of the National Institute of Informatics in Tokyo, the project will also investigate how the proposed technology for mapping monologue to dialogue can be interfaced with state-of-the-art multimedia information presentation systems (involving computer-animated characters and speech synthesis). The project will build on the pilot study described in Piwek et al. (2007).

Piwek, P., H. Hernault, H. Prendinger and M. Ishizuka (2007). Generating Dialogues between Virtual Agents Automatically from Text. In: Intelligent Virtual Agents: Proceedings of IVA07, LNAI 4722, pages 161-174. Springer Verlag.

*** A Research Position will be available on the project for:

a candidate with a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science (or related area)/equivalent experience, and good programming skills (preferably in Java).

Interest in all of the following areas and knowledge in at least one of the areas is desirable:

• Paraphrasing/Text-to-Text generation/Machine Translation
• Natural Language Generation
• Dialogue Modelling
• Corpus linguistics

£24,152 - £28,839 according to experience & qualifications.

Closing date for applications: 31 January 2009. Interviews are expected to be in February. We welcome informal enquiries. Please contact Paul Piwek for further details and information on the formal application process.


Dr. Paul Piwek
Lecturer in the Computing Department
Centre for Research in Computing
The Open University
Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, UK

Web: http://mcs.open.ac.uk/pp2464

Postdoctoral position in Text Analysis (University of Pisa, Italy)

The research will be conducted as part of an undergoing project on semantic tagging of Wikipedia, in cooperation with Yahoo! Research and the Institute of Computational Linguistics of the CNR (http://medialab.di.unipi.it/wiki/index.php/ Analisi di testi per il Semantic Web e il Question Answering).

The research will be conducted at the Department of Informatics with an opportunity to spend periods at Yahoo! Research Barcelona.

The successful candidates will have a strong background in computer science and knowledge of statistical machine learning techniques, with emphasis on text and natural language analysis. They are expected to provide leadership on technical issues and well as to contribute to the development of object oriented high performance applications.

Skills and Experience

• A background in Computer Science with specialization in Computational Linguistics or Natural Language Processing
  
• Expertise in text mining or information retrieval
  
• Thorough understanding of software development methodologies
  
• Excellent programming skills in C++ and Python
  
• Expert-level understanding of statistical machine learning techniques as applied to text analytics, e.g., information extraction, summarization, classification, clustering, tone/sentiment analysis, relevance ranking
  

Education

PhD in Computer Science, Computational Linguistics or equivalent.

Application

The details of the call are available at: http://medialab.di.unipi.it/Announcement/BandoAssegno.pdf

Closing date for application is January 12, 2009.

General information about the Department of Informatics can be found at http://www.di.unipi.it.

Postdoctoral Position in Computational Linguistics at Northwestern University

Pending availability of funding, the Analytical Crisis and Reputation Management group at Northwestern University is seeking to fill a postdoctoral research position for the project "Language and Political Behavior." This project brings together researchers from the Departments of Linguistics and Managerial Economics and Decision Sciences as part of the Northwestern Institute in Complex Systems (NICO). Its goal is to analyze written and spoken text in business and politics in order to detect and trace issues and opinions, tonality of documents, and to explore the relationship between linguistic output and voting patterns, interest group positioning and survey data. The project also explores applications to political and reputational risk management.

Candidates should hold a doctoral degree in Linguistics, Computer Science, or a related area. Requirements include:

(i) a solid theoretical background and practical experience in quantitative methods in computational linguistics and/or information retrieval;
(ii) excellent programming skills; and
(iii) a strong motivation and proven ability to work and publish collaboratively.

The position is available immediately. The initial appointment will be for 12 months, with the possibility of extension by another 12 months, subject to performance and availability of funding. Financial compensation will be competitive and commensurate with the candidate's qualification.

Prospective candidates should send their curriculum vitae, including list of publications, to the following address:

Justin Heinze

Center Administrator
Ford Motor Company Center for Global Citizenship
Kellogg School of Management
586 Donald P. Jacobs Center
2001 Sheridan Road
Evanston, IL 60208-2001

j-heinze@kellogg.northwestern.edu
Tel. (847)-467-0524
Fax. (847)-467-1220

Applicants should arrange for two letters of reference to be sent directly to the same address. For full consideration, application materials including letters should arrive no later than January 31, 2009. For further information, contact Stefan Kaufmann at kaufmann@northwestern.edu.

Northwestern University is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer, and applications from minority and women candidates are especially welcome. Hiring is contingent upon eligibility to work in the United States.

Post-Doctoral Position in Health Informatics - University of Minnesota

The University of Minnesota Department of Pharmaceutical Care and Health Systems (Twin Cities) and the Computer Science Department (Duluth) invite applicants for a post-doctoral position in health informatics. This position will support a project that will focus on developing measures of semantic relatedness among biomedical concepts and applying these measures for medication safety surveillance. The University of Minnesota has a strong emphasis on Biomedical and Health Informatics. The successful applicant for this position will join a dynamic and rapidly growing group of investigators with a broad spectrum of expertise including informatics, computer science, pharmacy, medicine, public health, linguistics and cognitive science.

The successful candidate will have a doctorate degree in computer science, computational linguistics, information science, health informatics or a closely related discipline. The candidate will also have a strong programming background (Java, C++ and/or Perl) as the work will involve software development and evaluation including database management and web-based technologies.

Preference will be given to candidates with strong backgrounds in natural language processing and machine learning and those that have demonstrated experience in working with measuring semantic similarity and ontological and terminological resources such as WordNet, UMLS, SNOMED-CT. Familiarity with building software applications for distributed multi-processor platforms is also a plus.

Interested individuals should submit a letter of intent, a curriculum vitae, and contact information for three references to : Dr. Serguei Pakhomov (pakh0002@umn.edu) and Dr. Ted Pedersen (tpederse@d.umn.edu)

Application review process will begin on February 1, 2009. This is a one year appointment, which can be renewed for up to three years.

Research Assistant, Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing, University of Glasgow

A vacancy has arisen for a Research Assistant to work on the Corpus of Modern Scottish Writing (1700-1945). The AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) awarded a grant over three years (June 2007-May 2010) for the development of an electronic corpus of Scottish literary and non-literary texts from the period of 1700-1945. This corpus is to be mounted on the Web and will be freely available to researchers, educators and members of the public. The focus of the corpus is on Scots and Scottish English. The appointee will work under the supervision of the Glasgow grant-holders, Professor John Corbett and Professor Jeremy Smith, and the Computing Officer, Mr Dave Beavan. The project team includes a postgraduate research student, Mr Dorian Grieve, and associated members of staff, including Mrs Jean Anderson, Dr Wendy Anderson and Professor Christian Kay. The primary task of the Research Assistant will be to support the grant-holders and Computing Officer in maintaining the work-flow necessary to deliver the project targets within the final 17 months of the funding period. The Research Assistant will also contribute to the research outputs of the project.
For further information please visit www.gla.ac.uk/jobs/vacancies

Application Forms should be submitted to the Human Resources Department (Recruitment Section), University of Glasgow, Glasgow, G12 8QQ.

Closing Date: 17 December 2008

INTERVIEWS FOR THIS POST WILL TAKE PLACE ON MONDAY 12th JANUARY 2009.

Eight Ph.D. Fellowships in Linguistics, 2008

Eight Ph.D. Fellowships in Linguistics, 2008
--------------------------------------------

The Center for Language and Cognition Groningen (CLCG) announces the
eight fellowships for study leading to Ph.D. degrees in Linguistics.

http://www.let.rug.nl/~nerbonne/clcg/phd-2008/

Two-Year Lecturer Position

Two-Year Lecturer Position (Universitaire Docent)
-------------------------------------------------

The department of Humanities Computing (Alfa-Informatica) at the
University of Groningen is seeking a temporary:

Lecturer (Universitair Docent)
Full-time position for two years

http://www.let.rug.nl/nerbonne/clcg/ud-ik-2008/

Researcher Positions in Text Processing for Biomedical Applications

Researcher / Senior Researcher Positions in Text and Language
Processing for Biomedical Applications

NICTA Victoria Research Laboratory
Melbourne, Australia

National ICT Australia (NICTA) is looking to fill research positions for a new project in Text and Language Processing for Biomedical Applications. Appointments may be made at the Researcher or at the Senior Researcher level. Appointments are for at least 2 years, potentially renewable for a 3rd year, to commence in 2008. Remuneration is at an internationally competitive level.

To apply and to view full Position Descriptions, go to http://nicta.com.au/about/careers
For further information or any enquiries, contact Dr. Lawrence Cavedon at lawrence.cavedon@nicta.com.au .

Closing date is February 15, 2008.

----------------------------------
The appointee will work with NICTA research staff, engineering staff, University of Melbourne faculty and postgraduate students, and external biomedical collaborators (especially within Melbourne's Bio21 precinct) to develop new techniques in information access and presentation, document processing, and text mining, with application to the biomedical research and clinical domain. Expected outcomes will include fundamental research, publications in high-impact venues, development of novel IP, and prototype systems and demonstrators (developed together with engineering staff). Other duties will include working with external biomedical partners to understand and respond to needs, and supervision of University of Melbourne research students.

Key requirements and selection criteria for the positions include:

• a PhD in Computer Science, Computational Linguistics, Artificial Intelligence, or a related discipline;
• a strong track record of publication in respected journals and international conferences;
• demonstrated expertise in a research area related to the goals of the project, including: information retrieval, natural language processing, question answering, human computer interaction in an IR setting, parsing, named entity recognition and resolution, text summarisation, ontology building / integration, system efficiency;
• good interpersonal skills and a demonstrated commitment to working collaboratively in a research team and delivering on team goals;
• excellent communication skills in a variety of contexts, including presentation of research and liasing with external collaborators;
• a strong interest in collaborating with external domain partners to understand their needs and to jointly develop solutions;
• applicants to the Senior Researcher level are expected to have demonstrated ability to craft a research agenda and to effectively supervise junior staff and research students.

Other desirable skills and selection criteria include:

• previous experience in the biomedical domain;
• programming skills in a variety of languages, including C/C++, Java,Python, Perl;
• demonstrated experience in statistical techniques to NLP and/or experimental design and analysis for computer science research;
• an interest in developing Intellectual Property that may lead to commercial development by NICTA.

National ICT Australia (NICTA) is Australia's ICT Research Centre of Excellence. NICTA aims to bring together world-class researchers and professional staff, enhance their skills, and build a culture of entrepreneurship and achievement in use-inspired research that will build Australia's ICT capacity. See http://www.nicta.com.au for more information.

NICTA's Victoria Research Laboratory (VRL) is housed on the University of Melbourne campus, in the Parkville precinct of Melbourne, and within walking distance to one of the world's richest congregation of biomedical hospitals and research institutions. NICTA VRL has made a strong commitment to developing its Bioiformatics research program;
the Snr/Researcher will be encouraged to work with researchers from the wider Bioinformatics team, as well as the other researchers on this specific project. VRL has establised partnerships with a number of Melbourne's leading biomedical research institutions and biomedical projects with international profile; further collaborative partnerships are constantly being developed.

Text and Language Processing for Biomedical Applications

Researcher / Senior Researcher Positions in
Text and Language Processing for Biomedical Applications

NICTA Victoria Research Laboratory
Melbourne, Australia

National ICT Australia (NICTA) is looking to fill research positions for a new project in Text and Language Processing for Biomedical Applications. Appointments may be made at the Researcher or at the Senior Researcher level. Appointments are for at least 2 years, potentially renewable for a 3rd year, to commence in 2008. Remuneration is at an internationally competitive level.

To apply and to view full Position Descriptions, go to http://nicta.com.au/about/careers. For further information or any enquiries, contact Dr. Lawrence Cavedon at lawrence.cavedon@nicta.com.au .

Closing date is February 15, 2008.

----------------------------------------
The appointee will work with NICTA research staff, engineering staff, University of Melbourne faculty and postgraduate students, and external biomedical collaborators (especially within Melbourne's Bio21 precinct) to develop new techniques in information access and presentation, document processing, and text mining, with application to the biomedical research and clinical domain. Expected outcomes will include fundamental research, publications in high-impact venues, development of novel IP, and prototype systems and demonstrators (developed together with engineering staff). Other duties will include working with external biomedical partners to understand and respond to needs, and supervision of University of Melbourne research students.

Key requirements and selection criteria for the positions include:

• a PhD in Computer Science, Computational Linguistics, Artificial Intelligence, or a related discipline;
• a strong track record of publication in respected journals and international conferences;
• demonstrated expertise in a research area related to the goals of the project, including: information retrieval, natural language processing, question answering, human computer interaction in an IR setting, parsing, named entity recognition and resolution, text summarisation, ontology building / integration, system efficiency;
• good interpersonal skills and a demonstrated commitment to working collaboratively in a research team and delivering on team goals;
• excellent communication skills in a variety of contexts, including presentation of research and liasing with external collaborators;
• a strong interest in collaborating with external domain partners to understand their needs and to jointly develop solutions;
• applicants to the Senior Researcher level are expected to have demonstrated ability to craft a research agenda and to effectively supervise junior staff and research students.

Other desirable skills and selection criteria include:

• previous experience in the biomedical domain;
• programming skills in a variety of languages, including C/C++, Java, Python, Perl;
• demonstrated experience in statistical techniques to NLP and/or experimental design and analysis for computer science research;
• an interest in developing Intellectual Property that may lead to commercial development by NICTA.

National ICT Australia (NICTA) is Australia's ICT Research Centre of Excellence. NICTA aims to bring together world-class researchers and professional staff, enhance their skills, and build a culture of entrepreneurship and achievement in use-inspired research that will build Australia's ICT capacity.

See http://www.nicta.com.au for more information.

NICTA's Victoria Research Laboratory (VRL) is housed on the University of Melbourne campus, in the Parkville precinct of Melbourne, and within walking distance to one of the world's richest congregation of biomedical hospitals and research institutions. NICTA VRL has made a strong commitment to developing its Bioiformatics research program; the Snr/Researcher will be encouraged to work with researchers from the wider Bioinformatics team, as well as the other researchers on this specific project. VRL has establised partnerships with a number of Melbourne's leading biomedical research institutions and biomedical projects with international profile; further collaborative partnerships are constantly being developed.

Postdoctoral Position at INRIA Nancy (France)

Postdoctoral Position at INRIA Nancy (France)

Field: Computational Linguistics

Topic: Surface realisation and large scale over-generation detection

Deadline for application: February 15, 2008.

Starting Date: 01 November 2008

Employer: INRIA (French National Institute for Research in Computer
Science) Nancy Grand Est (France)

Job Description: The Lorraine Laboratory of IT Research and its Applications (Nancy, France) has a position for a Postdoctoral fellow to work on the development of a surface realiser for French.

Applicants must have a ** recent doctoral degree ** (PhD viva held in may 2007 or later) or defend their PhD before the end of 2008. They must have expertise in an area relevant to the project (linguistics, computational linguistics, computer science), strong hands-on experience in Natural Language Processing and a particular interest in NL generation. A good knowledge of Haskell is a necessity.

Further particulars and details of how to apply are available at:

http://www.loria.fr/~gardent

The official closing date is February 15, 2007, but applications will be processed until the position is filled.

Contact: Claire Gardent <claire.gardent@loria.fr>

ACL 2008 Student Research Workshop

-----------------------------------------------------------
ACL 2008 Student Research Workshop
June 15-20, 2008, Columbus Ohio

*** Final Call for Papers, Deadline: January 10, 2008! ***

URL: http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/acl08/srw.html
-----------------------------------------------------------

1. General Invitation for Submissions

The Student Research Workshop is an established tradition at ACL conferences. The workshop provides a venue for student researchers investigating topics in Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing to present their work and receive feedback. Participants will have the opportunity to receive feedback from a general audience as well as from panelists; the panelists are experienced researchers who will prepare in-depth comments and questions in advance of the presentation.

We would like to invite student researchers to submit their work to the workshop. Since this workshop is an excellent opportunity to ask for suggestions, to receive useful feedback and to run your ideas by an international audience of researchers, the emphasis of the workshop will be on work in progress. The research being presented can come from any topic area within computational linguistics including, but not limited to, the following topic areas:

• pragmatics, discourse, semantics, syntax and the lexicon
• phonetics, phonology and morphology
• linguistic, mathematical and psychological models of language
• information retrieval, information extraction, question answering
• summarization and paraphrasing
• speech recognition, speech synthesis
• corpus-based language modeling
• multi-lingual processing, machine translation, translation aids
• spoken and written natural language interfaces, dialogue systems
• multi-modal language processing, multimedia systems
• message and narrative understanding systems

2. Submission Requirements

The emphasis of the workshop is on original and unpublished research. The papers should describe original work in progress. Students who have settled on their thesis direction but still have significant research left to do are particularly encouraged to submit their papers.

Since the main purpose of presenting at the workshop is to exchange ideas with other researchers and to receive helpful feedback for further development of the work, papers should clearly indicate directions for future research wherever appropriate. All authors of multi-author papers must be students. Papers submitted for this workshop are eligible only if they have not been presented at any other meeting with publicly available published proceedings. Students who have already presented at an ACL/EACL/NAACL Student Research
Workshop may not submit to this workshop. They should submit their papers to the main conference instead. It must be indicated if a paper has been submitted to another conference or workshop.

3. Submission Procedure

Submissions should follow the two-column format of ACL proceedings and should not exceed six (6) pages, including references. We strongly recommend the use of ACL LaTeX style files or Microsoft Word style files tailored for this year's conference. These files are available at ling.ohio-state.edu/acl08/stylefiles.html. A description of the format is available there in case you are unable to use these style files directly. All submissions must be electronic. Please use the submission page to submit your paper.

4. Reviewing Procedure

Reviewing of papers submitted to the Student Workshop will be managed by the Student Workshop Co-Chairs, with the assistance of a team of reviewers. Each submission will be matched with a mixed panel of student and senior researchers for review. The final acceptance
decision will be based on the results of the review. Note that reviewing of papers will be double-blind; therefore, please make sure your paper shows the title, but no author information. You should likewise not have any self identifying references anywhere in the paper submitted for review. For example, rather than this: ''We showed previously (Smith, 2001), ...'', use citations such as: ''Smith (2001) previously showed ...''.

5. Schedule

The papers must be submitted no later than midnight, January 10th, 2008 . No papers received after January 10th, 2008 will be accepted. Acknowledgment will be emailed soon after receipt. Notification of acceptance will be sent to authors (by email) on February 28th, 2008. Detailed formatting guidelines for the preparation of the final camera-ready copy will be provided to authors with their acceptance notice.

Important Dates:

Paper submission deadline: January 10, 2008
Notification of acceptance: February 28, 2008
Camera-ready paper submission deadline: April 14, 2008
Conference date: June 15-20, 2008
(The workshop will be held during the main conference)

6. Contact Information

If you need to contact the Co-Chairs of the Student Workshop, please
use: acl08srw@ling.osu.edu. An e-mail sent to this address will be
forwarded to all Co-Chairs.

Ebru Arisoy (Speech Co-Chair)
Bogazici University,
Bebek, Istanbul, Turkey

Wolfgang Maier (NLP Co-Chair)
University of Tuebingen
Tuebingen, Germany

Keisuke Inoue (IR Co-Chair)
Syracuse University
Syracuse, New York, USA

Tenure junior research position for 2008

Tenure junior research position for 2008
http://www.limsi.fr/tlp/postes07.html
[Application deadline 09-JAN-08 23:59 Paris time]

CR2 position 48/03 in section 48 (Communication sciences) Information systems, multimedia and multilingual documents, knowledge industry.

Job description

The candidate will conduct research in the field of information processing with application to multimedia and multilingual documents. The main research direction will be the development of models and algorithms for automatic structuring, indexing, enrichment and extraction of knowledge from speech data in a multilingual context. It is envisioned that the models studied will be based on the joint use of linguistic knowledge and statistical learning methods applied to very large corpora. The candidate should have an expertise in at least one of following areas: spoken language processing, statistical based machine translation, and audio data mining. This
research will contribute to the development of emerging technologies for knowledge engineering and information access. A variety of new applications can be foreseen related to audiovisual archives, digital libraries, the production of multimedia documents, and more generally systems to organize and access multimedia and multilingual content, especially on the Internet.

Other related research positions are also listed on http://www.limsi.fr/tlp/postes07.html

ESSLLI 2008 STUDENT SESSION

2nd Call for Papers

ESSLLI 2008 STUDENT SESSION
4-18 August 2008, Hamburg, Germany

Submission deadline: 15 February 2008
Website: http://staff.science.uva.nl/~kbalogh/StuS13

***********************************************************

We are pleased to announce the Student Session of the 20th European Summer School in Logic, Language and Information to be held in Hamburg, Germany on August 4-15, 2008.

The aim of the Student Session is to give an opportunity to students at all levels (Bachelor-, Master- and PhD-students) to present and discuss their work in progress with a possibility to get feedback from senior researchers. Each year, 18 papers are selected for oral presentation and a number of others for poster presentation.


CALL FOR PAPERS

The programme committee invites submissions of papers for oral and poster presentation and
for appearance in the proceedings. We welcome submissions with topics within the areas of
Logic, Language and Computation.

*** Submission deadline: 15 February 2008 ***

The ESSLLI Student Session encourages submissions from students at any level, undergraduates as well as postgraduates. Papers co-authored by non-students will not be accepted. The Student Session papers should describe original, unpublished work, completed or in progress, that demonstrates insight, creativity, and promise. No previously published papers should be submitted.


SUBMISSION

Student authors are invited to submit a full paper up to 7 pages inclusive of references. Note that the length of the final version of the accepted papers will not be allowed to exceed 10 pages.

The preferred formats of submissions are PostScript or PDF, although other formats will also be accepted. More submission details and all relevant information at:

http://staff.science.uva.nl/~kbalogh/StuS13


CONTACT

Kata Balogh
ESSLLI 2008 Student Session chair

email: k.balogh@uva.nl
tel.: +31 20 5254544
fax: +31 20 5254503
postal address:
Department of Philosophy
Universiteit van Amsterdam
Nieuwe Doelenstraat 15
1012 CP Amsterdam
The Netherlands

Research Associate position in Lancaster, UK

Lancaster University has an open position for a one-year research associate to work on a project applying corpus-based techniques to the study of Nepali grammar (see brief description below).

For further details and to apply online, see: http://www.personnel.lancs.ac.uk/vacancydets.aspx?jobid=A966

Informal enquiries can be made to Andrew Hardie (email: a.hardie@lancaster.ac.uk).

Lancaster University, Department of Linguistics

Description Research Associate
Salary £23,002 - £26,666
Reference A966
Closing date 16th Jan 2008

We wish to appoint a Research Associate who is a native or native-like speaker of Nepali, to work on a research project comparing Nepali grammar with the grammar of other languages. The successful applicant will work within the UCREL research centre of the Department of Linguistics and English Language, using corpus-based methods and tools to investigate the distribution of grammatical features in Nepali.

The position requires a background in linguistics - specifically grammar - as well as full fluency in both written and spoken Nepali. Sound basic-level IT skills are essential.

You will work alongside the project investigator, using quantitative, distributional data drawn from a corpus (i.e. co-occurrence and collocation statistics) to research the delineation and characterisation of grammatical categories in Nepali.

Fluency in English and good oral and written communication skills are essential, as is the ability to work semi-independently when necessary, but also the ability to collaborate productively with colleagues.

The post is available from 1 April 2008, or as soon as possible thereafter, for 12 months.

Apologies for any double posting.

Andrew Hardie
Linguistics & English Language
Bowland College
Lancaster University
Lancaster LA1 4YT
United Kingdom

www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/staff/hardie

Vacancy at Language and Computation in Amsterdam

Vacancy at the Language and Computation section, Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) ,
Faculty of Exact Sciences, University of Amsterdam (UvA) .

Position: POSTDOC researcher
Topics: Statistical Parsing and/or Statistical Machine Translation
Duration: 3 years
Salary (gross per month):
* Depending on demonstrable experience and assumed duties approx. minimum Euro 2598 and maximum Euro 4140
* Social benefits as common at Dutch universities.

Deadline for applications: As soon as possible before Sunday 13 January 2008.

More details (including new ones) are available at
See http://staff.science.uva.nl/~simaan/postdoc_adv.html

Computer Linguistics in Nederlands

Vacancies for two computer linguists

The Institute for Dutch Lexicology has two vacancies for experienced computer linguists for the development of Named Entity Processing tools for IMPACT.

IMPACT is a new European research project in the field of informatics for the humanities. The project will start on 1 january 2008. In IMPACT 15 National libraries and research institutes from Europe, Israel and Russia will work together.

The main purpose of IMPACT is to obtain a significant improvement of the accessibility of historical documents.

To achieve this, the following will be tackled:

Current OCR-software is not suitable for mass digitisation of historical documents. Within the project, OCR software will be developed that will significantly improve the accuracy of state -of-the-art systems, so as to enable for the first time, reliable full text mass digitisation of historical documents.
Information in historical documents is not easily accessed by modern users because of the historical language barrier. Within the project, historical lexica and linguistic processing tools will be developed that will enable enriched indexing to provide access historical material with contemporary query.
To be effective the lexica will also have to contain Named Entity data and tools for NE recognition and NE classification for historical language material will have to be developed.

Tasks

The NE specialists will be responsible for the development of a toolbox for NE lexicon building and NE lexicon deployment to tackle historical language material to be used for the improvement of OCR of historical texts and for better retrieval on historical text material. The work will imply the implementation as well as the design of relevant algorithms.

Profile

• relevant background in computational linguistics, computer science or applied mathematics (master level, preferably PHD level)
• sufficient knowledge and experience with the development and implementation of NLP algorithms, preferably in the field of NE processing
• sufficient experience in developing complex software systems; preferably proficiency in C, C++ and/or Java
• knowledge of Dutch language is required, preferably knowledge of historical Dutch language

Offer

An INL contract for two years. According to the cao–Onderzoekinstellingen the salary scale indicated for this job is 11 max., with a maximum of € 4.138, - gross per month on the basis of a 40 hour week. In addition you will be entitled to 42 days holiday per year plus holiday pay.

Interested

Contact Katrien Depuydt (Taalbank) INL, Postbus 9515, 2300 RA, Leiden

tel. (+31 (0)71 527 2479), email: depuydt@inl.nl.

Send your application to Dr. Jeannine Beeken, INL, Postbus 9515, 2300RA Leiden, email: secretariaat@inl.nl

Closing date: 02-01-2008

Postdoctoral Position at INRIA Nancy

Postdoctoral Position at INRIA Nancy (France)


Linguistic Field(s): Computational Linguistics

Topic: Surface realisation and large scale over-generation detection

Deadline: February 15, 2008.

Employer: INRIA (French National Institute for Research in Computer
Science) Nancy Grand Est (France)

Job Description: The Lorraine Laboratory of IT Research and its
Applications (Nancy, France) has a position for a Postdoctoral fellow
to work on the development of a surface realiser for French.

Applicants must have a ** recent doctoral degree ** (Doctoral thesis
less than one year old before the recruitment's date) or defend their
PhD before the end of 2008. They must have expertise in an area
relevant to the project (linguistics, computational linguistics,
computer science), strong hands-on experience in Natural Language
Processing and a particular interest in NL generation. A good
knowledge of Haskell is a necessity.

Further particulars and details of how to apply are available at:

http://www.loria.fr/~gardent

The official closing date is February 15, 2007, but applications will
be processed until the position is filled.

Contact: Claire Gardent