Corpora: [O][postdoc] Natural Language Processing and Man-Machine Dialogue - Lausanne (Switzerland) - EPFL

[Jean-Cedric Chappelier]

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               Post-Doctoral Position

   in Natural Language Processing and Man-Machine Dialogue

at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory of EPFL (Switzerland)
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The Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (LIA) of the Swiss Federal
Institute of  Technology at Lausanne (EPFL)  carries out research
projects   in  several   domains  of   Language   Processing  and
Man-Machine  Dialogue (probabilistic  parsing,  content sensitive
document management,  information retrieval, text  mining) and is
involved   in   several    European   projects   and   industrial
collaborations. (URL:
http://liawww.epfl.ch/Research/research.html#NaturalLanguageProcessing
)

The  LIA  is  currently  looking  for  a  Post-Doctoral  Research
Assistant in  Computer Science to contribute to  its research and
development  activities in  the domain  of  Man-Machine Dialogue.
The foreseen  research activity will take place  in the framework
of the  European Project INSPIRE (briefly described bellow), for
which the selected candidate would be partly responsible.

Applicants should hold a  PhD in Computer Science (or equivalent)
or expect to complete one  before the start date.  Good knowledge
of  C/C++ is  required.  Background in  Man-Machine Dialogue  and
Natural Language Processing is desirable.

The position is  available immediately and runs for  1 year (with
possible  continuation).   It will  be  held  at EPFL  (Lausanne,
Switzerland).

The  appointment  will be  in  the order  of  70'000  CHF a  year
(~ $42'000,  ~ 48'000 euros)  depending on the  qualification and
experience of the applicant.

Interested persons should submit a resume to (e-mail preferred):

Martin RAJMAN
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (LIA)
EPFL, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology
IN Ecublens
CH-1015 LAUSANNE, Switzerland
fax: +41 21 693.52.25
e-mail: Martin.Rajman at epfl.ch


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Description of the work for EPFL in the INSPIRE Project
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INSPIRE European Project (IST-2001 research Programme)

Title:  INfotainment management with SPeech Interaction
        via Remote-microphones and tElephone interfaces

Full Project Abstract:
The proposed  project aims at  the development of  a multilingual
interactive, natural speech dialogue-based assistant for wireless
command  and control  of home  appliances. Emphasis  is  given on
infotainment   equipment  and   services,  due   to   their  high
complexity,    which   makes    advanced    dialogue   techniques
necessary.  To this end,  leading-edge technologies  available to
the   partners  of   the  consortium,   i.e.   continuous  speech
recognition, speech synthesis, speaker identification, etc., will
be integrated into a  prototype, which will be extensively tested
and optimized.  The user of the  proposed system will  be able to
initiate natural  spoken dialogues and ask  for information about
the current status of any appliance and/or control it, requesting
assistance on its use, etc.  Furthermore, he/she will be able, to
use   the  connection   with  the   public  network,   to  access
telecommunication voice services etc.

EPFL is involved in the "Dialogue Interaction" Work Package (WP):
In this WP,  the dialogue component will be  set up. Multilingual
Wizard of Oz (WoZ) experiments will be conducted to determine the
dialogue flow for each language  that will be incorporated in the
system.  A  dialogue  simulation   tool  will  be  developed  and
additional user modelling functionalities will be incorporated to
the dialogue component. The  dialogue and language models derived
from the WoZ experiments will be used as bootstrap models for the
dialogue  system.   Subsequently,  when  the system  is  set  up,
utterances spoken  by users will  be recorded and  transcribed in
order to improve the current dialogue and language models.

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--
Jean-Cédric Chappelier           | WWW: http://liawww.epfl.ch/~chaps
EPFL, I&C - IIF - LIA,           | Tel:      +41 21 693.66.83 or .78
INR (Ecublens), CH-1015 Lausanne | Fax:             +41 21 693.52.25