Corpora: Machine Learning of Natural Language post at York

[James Cussens]

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RESEARCH ASSOCIATE POSITION AT DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE,
	UNIVERSITY OF YORK

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Machine Learning of Natural Language in a Computational Logic Framework

Research Assistant

This post requires a post-doctoral researcher with a background in
Machine Learning, Logic Programming or Natural Language Processing.
The project will be carried out jointly with Prof. S. Pulman,
Department of Linguistics, University of Oxford, and will be supported
under an EPSRC ROPA grant.  The project will involve using Inductive
Logic Programming to learn natural language grammars.

The appointment is for a period of two years and is available
immediately. Starting salary within Grade IA (16,286 GBP - 24,479 GBP)
of the scales for research staff.

Informal enquiries may be made to: Prof. Stephen Muggleton
(stephen at cs.york.ac.uk, Tel: +44 1904 434750) and more information
about Inductive Logic Programming and its application to deriving
natural language grammars http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/aig/lll and
http://www.cs.york.ac.uk/mlg/ .

Further information on how to apply can be obtained from
http://www.york.ac.uk/admin/persnl/jobs/ .

CLOSING DATE FOR APPLICATIONS IS 25TH AUGUST 2000.


Further particulars
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Project: EPSRC ROPA: Machine Learning of Natural Language in a Computational
	Logic Framework
	Start date: 1/9/00.
	Value: 99,156 pounds.

Investigators:	Prof. S. Muggleton, York

Overview:

This is an interdisciplinary project, involving computer science and
linguistics, which aims to test the hypothesis that computers can use
logic-based Machine Learning (ML) algorithms to acquire and augment,
semi-automatically, abilities in the generation and understanding of
natural language. The proposed research will extend algorithms based
on Inductive Logic Programming (ILP).  We shall consider problems of
automatic learning of both syntax and semantics, from the starting
point of a partial grammar, together with sample sentences and their
logical meanings. ILP will be used to (1) increase grammar coverage;
(2) induce domain theories to disambiguate parsing.

If the project is successful, Computational Linguistics (CLi) will
acquire an alternative strategy to grammar construction, potentially
combining the large coverage of the existing statistical methods with
the deeper level of analysis that logical representations allow.


Department

The Department of Computer Science has a record of high achievement in
research and teaching.  It was rated Grade 5* (i.e. attainable levels
of international excellence in a majority of sub-areas of activity and
to attainable levels of national excellence in all others) in the 1996
Research Assessment Exercise, and Excellent (i.e. demonstrably very
high levels of achievement and best practice) in the 1994 Teaching
Quality Assessment Exercise.  The University won the 1996 Queen's
Anniversary Prize for Higher and Further Education for the work of the
Department of Computer Science, and a recent ranking of UK Computer
Science departments placed the department equal first in a ranking of
83 institutions.

Research Group

The AI group at York is led by Professor Stephen Muggleton, who joined
the the Department from Oxford University in October 1997.  The group
currently has seven lecturers, six Postdoctoral researchers and ten
graduate students.  The group is well known internationally for its
develoment of the theory and applications of machine learning, natural
language processing and knowledge representation.