Vacancy PostDoc, Statistical NLP

The Institute for Logic, Language and Computation
http://www.illc.uva.nl

Postdoctoral Researcher

1.0 fte (38h per week)

For both internal and external candidates

Summary

• Position: POSTDOC researcher
• Duration: 2 years (full time, 38hrs per week)
  
• Salary (gross per month): minimum Euro 2379 and maximum Euro 3755 in the first year.
• The Collective Employment Agreement of the Dutch Universities is applicable.
• Last date for application: February 15, 2009.
  

Project

Priors for the Estimation of Probabilistic Grammars from Incomplete Natural Language Data
VIDI project Sima'an [2007-2011]

Abstract: The project aims at exploring the utility of available prior knowledge in specifying the model (hypothesis space) and the constraints on the objective estimation function for unsupervised estimation of probabilistic grammars for Statistical Machine Translation and Statistical Parsing.
This project addresses problems of unsupervised estimation in the face of different kinds of incomplete data (parallel and monolingual corpora):

1. A raw text corpus,
2. A partially annotated corpus possibly with negative examples, and
3. A raw in-domain corpus and an out-of-domain annotated corpus.
   

Corpus annotation is e.g., word-alignment, syntactic or semantic structure.

Example topics studied within the project (see project related publications):

• Statistical machine translation with hierarchical/syntactic structure, e.g., statistical estimation [Mylonakis and Sima'an 2007 and 2008], lexical syntactic structrure [Hassan, Way and Sima'an 2007 and 2008]
  
• Statistical machine translation with morphological structure -- Work in progress 2009,
  
• Inducing hidden compositional structure for machine translation (possibly using syntactic structure) -- Work in progress 2009.
  

Project team: Markos Mylonakis, Tejaswini Deoskar, and Khalil Sima'an (project leader).
Affiliated researchers: Reut Tsarfaty.
External collaborators: Hany Hassan , Barbara Plank and Andy Way.


Requirements

We seek a cooperative yet independent researcher who is passionate about empirical research, statistical methods and NLP/CL.
The following are the main requirements:

• obtained a Ph.D. recently (or will obtain it in the very near future, in which case testemoney from the PhD thesis Supervisor is needed)
• a strong background, experience in and affinity with the largest subset of the following areas:

1. Computational Linguistics/Natural Language Processing working with statistical methods
2. Machine Learning Applied to NLP with good knowledge of unsupervised statistical methods.
   
3. Statistical Machine Translation.
4. Unsupervised statistical methods for statistical Parsing.

Appointment

The appointment will be on a temporary basis for a maximum period of 2 years. Based on a full-time appointment (38 hours per week) the gross monthly salary will range from € 2379,- to, at the most, € 3755,- , in the first year depending on expertise and experience.

The Collective Employment Agreement of the Dutch Universities is applicable.

Application
To Dr Khalil Sima'an by email (k.simaan@uva.nl with subject heading: VIDI-POSTDOC).
The following documents (in pdf):

1. Letter expressing interest
   
2. Curriculum Vitae
3. List of publications (possibly including a downloadable pdf of your thesis)
   
4. Three letters of reference sent directly by the referees to Dr Khalil Sima'an
   
5. Optional: Research plan (1 page)

Last date for application: February 15, 2009.

For inquiries contact

Dr Khalil Sima'an.
Language and Computation
Computer Science
University of Amsterdam

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

NLP Researcher at Motorola

Motorola’s Applied Research and Technology Center currently has the following research position available:

Text Processing Senior Staff Research Engineer
Job ID 83273
Location: Schaumburg, IL, United States (Suburban Chicago)
Job Category: Research Engineering, Software Engineering

Basic Qualifications

• Position requires enrollment in a Ph.D. program or a Masters Degree
• plus 1+ years experience in Computer Science; Computer Engineering;
• Electrical Engineering; Electrical and Computer Engineering;
• Computational Linguistics; or Linguistics.

Department Description

The Text Analysis and Processing Lab is part of Motorola's Applied Research and Technology Center (ARTC), where Motorola researchers study the interaction of people, devices, content, services, and environments.

Scope of Responsibilities/Expectations

This full-time position requires a Ph.D. with graduation date by June 30, 2009 or a Masters Degree plus 1+ years experience in Computer Science, Computer Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Computational Linguistics, or Linguistics. The candidate's areas of specialization should include natural language processing, machine learning, or information retrieval. The candidate will be involved in projects employing advanced aspects of natural language processing, which may include machine learning and statistical approaches to natural language processing in projects related to information retrieval, information extraction, summarization, content matching and recommendation, topic identification, machine translation, or statistical modeling. These projects will typically involve the use of high-level linguistic or semantic abstractions. The successful candidate will become part of the Text Analysis and Processing Lab, which is part of a combined team within Motorola's Applied Research and Technology Center focusing on the advanced research and processing of textual, audio, and video streams.

Specific Knowledge/Skills

Experience in natural language processing required. Experience in machine learning desired. Candidate should have good statistical nlp grounding. C++, Java, or Python experience a plus.

To apply, please go to: http://www.motorolacareers.com/ select: Global Career Search in Search by Job ID, enter position: 83273

2 research assistants for TextMining in Geneva, Switzerland

University of Applied Science Geneva & University Hospitals of Geneva, Switzerland

The Geneva Text Mining and Bibliomics group is looking for two talented research assistants. Positions are funded for at least three years and should be fulfilled asap. Candidates should have the following qualifications:

• a strong academic record in computer science, computational linguistics, information science, bioinformatics or chemoinformatics;
• a clear interest in practical applications and service delivery to end-users;
• a solid background in at least one of the following areas: information retrieval, machine learning, ontology engineering, bibliometrics;
• a clear aptitude for independent and creative research as evidenced byan excellent master or phd thesis - possibility to participate in a PhD program will be offered;
• good communication skills in English and optionally in French - or at least a clear indication of willingness to learn the latter;
• the following items would be an asset: previous experience with patent document processing; familiarity with biochemistry, medicinal chemistry, toxicology, adverse effect signaling or drug design.

Please send your curriculum vitae, academic transcript, and contact information to patrick.ruch[at]sim.hcuge.ch

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.

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