Corpora: HCRC Edinburgh: Two research positions in NLP

[Jon Oberlander]

[Apologies if you receive this more than once]

Human Communication Research Centre
Two research positions in natural language processing

The Institute for Communicating and Collaborative Systems (ICCS), in
the Division of Informatics, at the University of Edinburgh draws on
the skills and expertise of one of the largest communities of natural
language processing specialists in Europe and has strong experience in
human-machine interaction, natural language understanding, speech
processing, and XML protocols.

We are now looking for two people to join our team to work on an
EU-funded three-year project on dialogue systems designed to enable
collaborative problem solving, in the context of e-commerce services
available on small mobile multimodal devices. Our work on the
project focuses on natural language and diagrammatic output, and on
the co-ordination of these to enhance the naturalness of the
interaction with the service.

We seek two individuals. One is to help with development of the
generation component and its associated linguistic resources, and the
dialogue manager.  The other is to help with the development and
evaluation of the fission component, which co-ordinates streams of
output in different modalities.

The ideal candidate for the first post will hold a degree in
Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science or Computational Linguistics
S/he will have practical experience in developing robust applications
and interfaces both on the algorithmic level and on the knowledge
construction level.  Programming or development expertise in Java, C
or C++ is essential, and experience with XML and Perl is highly
desirable.  Interest in categorial grammar or other lexicalised
grammars would be a distinct advantage.

The ideal candidate for the second post will hold a degree in
Computational Linguistics, Cognitive Science or Artificial
Intelligence and have an interest both in diagrammatic communication
and human-computer interaction.  S/he will have practical experience
in developing and evaluating multimodal interfaces both on the
algorithmic level and on the knowledge construction level.
Programming or development expertise in Java, C, C++ or Lisp is
essential. Experience with usability evaluation techniques, corpus
analysis or the design of dialogue annotation languages is highly
desirable.

In both cases, candidates with an interest in discourse planning,
dialogue management, and/or the practical aspects of natural language
generation are particularly encouraged to apply.

The appointments are for a fixed term of 3 years, starting in March
2002 or as soon as possible thereafter, and will be in the
salary range: £17,451 - £ 26,229 p.a, or £24,193 - £32,215 p.a.
Informal enquiries to J.Oberlander at ed.ac.uk

Further particulars and application details can be obtained from
http://www.jobs.ed.ac.uk
or the Personnel Department, The University of
Edinburgh, 9-16 Chambers Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1HT Tel: 0131 650 2511
(24 hour answering service) quoting the reference number 311136.

The closing date for applications is 22 February 2002.