[Corpora-List] Researcher position available: PhD in Natural Language Processing

[Nicolas HERNANDEZ]

Researcher position available: PhD in Natural Language Processing

The University of Nantes (West coast of France) offers an opening for a
3-year
PhD position at the LINA Computer Sciences Laboratory in the NLP Team (TALN).

LINA TALN leads research in several NLP domains such as term extraction,
syntactic and semantic analysis, and develops several applications (e.g.
machine translation, opinion mining, plagiarism detection).
LINA TALN participates in various projects founded by regional, national
and European sources.
http://www.lina.univ-nantes.fr/

*Subject:*
Discourse structure analysis and multilingual terminology alignment from
comparable corpora. Toward a discourse definition of the notion of context

*Brief description: *
Multilingual terminology alignment from comparable corpora is one of the
major
issue of the automatic translation problem. To tackle this issue, the
baseline
approach proposes to align terms whose contexts are considered as similar
thanks to bilingual dictionaries. This approach presents some drawbacks since
the context model is quite simple (a bag of words occurring around the
considered term) and because it requires external resources for performing.
The current study aims at exploring a new approach for building term
contexts.
The idea is to use a more linguistically inspired approach: in particular to
use discourse analysis both for providing semantically delimited text area
around term occurrences and rhetorically dependent utterances in relation to
the utterance where a term occurs. The work will start by trying out
state-of-art discourse analysis methods, then it will go into the
definition of
a discourse context notion related to the task in depth. This research will
pursue the works accomplished in the national and European projects MeTRICC
and TTC.

*Topics :*
Machine translation, Multilingual terminology alignment, Discourse analysis,
Comparable corpora

*Qualifications:
The ideal candidate would have:
- (or soon receive) a Master degree in computer science/engineering
- a background in NLP and/or machine learning
- programming skills in JAVA/Python
- experience in open source development (appreciated)
- good English proficiency and ability to learn French (if appropriate)

*Application procedure:*
The application deadline is April 20, 2012 , but consideration of candidates
will continue until the position is filled. It is expected to start on
October 2012.
Candidates interested in the position are asked to contact Nicolas Hernandez
and Emmanuel Morin (firstname.lastname at univ-nantes.fr) with the following
documents: A letter of motivation outlining your interest in the specific
project,
a curriculum vitae, at least two recommendation letters from a senior
researcher/professor who can judge your potential as a future PhD student.

The program will be funded by a grant from the French government.
Median annual earnings are between 20,000 and 24,000 Euros.

*More information on:*
http://www.edstim.fr/these/sujets-de-these/informatique
http://e.nicolas.hernandez.free.fr/pub/rec/12



_______________________________________________
UNSUBSCRIBE from this page: http://mailman.uib.no/options/corpora
Corpora mailing list
Corpora at uib.no
http://mailman.uib.no/listinfo/corpora