Job offer at FBK for Statistical Machine Translation, Trento - Italy

Call HLT09-01
Opening date: 12 January 2009 – Closing date: 31 March 2009

The “Human Language Technologies“ Research Unit of FBK (Trento, Italy) , is seeking a candidate to carry out research activities in the field of Statistical Machine Translation.

The candidate is expected to contribute original research results inside leading edge research projects, that aim to advance the state-of-the-art in MT by drawing ideas and contributions from different areas, such as machine learning, statistical language processing,high performance computing, statistical logic inference modelling, content processing from large corpora, etc.

More information about the HLT unit are available in http://hlt.fbk.eu

The ideal candidate should have:

• PhD Degree or post-graduate experience in MT or related fields
• Experience in statistical modelling and/or machine learning
• Skills in experimental work and development of algorithms in C++/C
• Ability to work in group and in distributed software development (open source)
• Ability to work and deliver in research projects
• Oral and written proficiency in English

Type of contract: 3 years, post-doc or research position. Possibility of tenure track.

To apply online please send your CV with relevant experience, qualifications and research interests to jobs@fbk.eu Ref. code: HLT09-01

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

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