27.3183, Support: English; Computational Linguistics / France

Fri Aug 5 16:50:45 UTC 2016

LINGUIST List: Vol-27-3183. Fri Aug 05 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.3183, Support: English; Computational Linguistics / France

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Date: Fri, 05 Aug 2016 12:50:37
From: Thierry Poibeau [thierry.poibeau at ens.fr]
Subject: English; Computational Linguistics, PhD, LATTICE-CNRS, France

 Institution/Organization: LATTICE-CNRS 
Department: LATTICE 
Web Address: http://www.lattice.cnrs.fr/?lang=en 

Level: PhD 

Duties: Research

Specialty Areas: Computational Linguistics 

Required Language(s): English (eng)

Description:

3 year PhD position in Paris area in Grammar learning 

The Lattice research unit (http://www.lattice.cnrs.fr/?lang=en) in Paris
offers a 3 year PhD studentship in the domain of natural language processing.
The PhD is related to the ERA-NET Atlantis project
(https://ai.vub.ac.be/atlantis) aiming at developing algorithms to study the
emergence of language in a community of robots (but the position does not
involve directly interacting with robots). The PhD candidate will be based at
Lattice (Paris area, France) but will work closely with the Atlantis partners,
especially the Sony research laboratory in Tokyo (esp. with Michael Spranger,
https://sites.google.com/site/michaelspranger/). 

The goal of the PhD is to study the inference of a grammar from semantic
utterances or, conversely to learn how to generate sentences from a semantic
representation in a specific robotic environment. The task will be defined
more precisely at the beginning of the PhD but is related for example to the
Semeval 2016 task 8 "Meaning Representation Parsing" based on AMR (abstract
meaning representation) defined as follows: "Abstract Meaning Representation
(AMR) is a compact, readable, whole-sentence semantic annotation. Annotation
components include entity identification and typing, PropBank semantic roles,
individual entities playing multiple roles, entity grounding via wikification,
as well as treatments of modality, negation, etc."
(http://alt.qcri.org/semeval2016/task8/)

In the Atlantis framework, the goal is not to be able to infer any grammar
from any English utterances but is limited to the language used by robots in
their environment, which makes the task easier to handle. We are also
interested in incremental aspects in learning: if new utterances are received
by a robot, how can the robot update and maintain its grammar so as to be able
to parse the new utterances? 

Evaluation will be done on standard datasets and on other datasets provided by
Sony. Note that even if the topic is related to robots, it does not require to
actually work with robots. 

We are looking for a candidate with the following skills:
- Advanced programming skills
- Previous experience in natural language processing
- A good knowledge of machine learning techniques
- Fluent in English (French would be a plus)

If you are interested, please write to Thierry Poibeau
(thierry.poibeau at ens.fr) as soon as possible, with a CV, a grade statement and
the names and email of two academic referees (who may be contacted later on.
We don’t need reference letter at this stage). Interviews will be done in
August or early September. The successful candidate is expected to begin in
October 2016. Salary will be around 1500 euros net. 

Relevant links:

Abstract Meaning Representation
http://amr.isi.edu/language.html

Michael Spranger and Luc Steels. Co-Acquisition of Syntax and Semantics - An
Investigation in Spatial Language. In IJCAI'15: Proceedings of the 24st
international joint conference on Artificial intelligence, pages 1909-1905,
Palo Alto, 2015. AAAI Press.
https://sites.google.com/site/michaelspranger/publications

SEMEVAL 2016 task 8 "Meaning Representation Parsing"  
http://alt.qcri.org/semeval2016/task8/

Application Deadline: 01-Sep-2016 

Mailing Address for Applications:
	Attn: Thierry Poibeau
	thierry.poibeau at ens.fr 

Contact Information: 
	Thierry Poibeau
	Dept:LATTICE
	Email:thierry.poibeau at ens.fr
	Phone:+33621075382  

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