[Corpora-List] Postdoc Position in Question Answering

[Maarten de Rijke]

Postdoc Position in Question Answering in Amsterdam

The Language & Inference Technology Group (http://lit.science.uva.nl/)
at the University of Amsterdam seeks a versatile, energetic, and
highly motivated postdoc to work on inference for question answering.
Our group has cutting-edge projects on information retrieval, natural
language processing, question answering, and computational logic.
Our team consists of about 20 faculty, postdoctoral researchers, and
graduate students, all with a strong international and
multi-disciplinary
orientation.

* Project description

Temporal information is often a significant part of the meaning
communicated in texts.  To know that something happened may be of
little value if we do not know when it happened, or what happened
before, since, or at the time.  Building on the recently released
TimeML annotation standard, the project will lay the groundwork
for temporal question answering systems by focusing on the central
role of inference in question analysis, candidate answer mining,
and answer generation.  The project aims to exploit
constraint-based reasoning, and in particular, model generation,
for temporal question answering.

There is a strong focus on experimental evaluations of the main
components of the envisaged architecture, especially with respect
to the overall temporal question answering task.

* Requirements

The candidate should hold a PhD-degree in a relevant area, and
have a strong background in one or more of the following:

- Question answering, esp.  statistical and corpus-based QA

- Computational semantics, esp.  of time, tense, aspect, actions
   and events

- Inference, esp. automated reasoning and constraint programming.

Strong programming skills (Perl, Java, C++) are a requirement.
Industrial experience, or a track-record of project-based
experimental work, is a definite advantage.

* Environment

We offer an extremely friendly working environment, excellent
computational facilities, a high level of interaction across
academic disciplines, and a location minutes from Amsterdam city
center, with easy access to other cities in the Netherlands and
Europe.  The three-year project includes a budget for
gold-standard or evaluation experiments, builds on the home-grown
Quartz system, is supported by a part-time programmer (50\%), and
has a generous equipment and travel budget.

* Contact details/Further information

Visit http://www.science.uva.nl/~mdr/Projects/ITEQA/ for an
on-line version of the project proposal.  Informal inquiries are
welcome and should be sent to Maarten de Rijke
(mdr at science.uva.nl) or Jaap Kamps (kamps at science.uva.nl).

To apply, send a full CV (including list of publications and a
description of your research interests), together with a cover
letter and names and contact details of at least two referees to
Maarten de Rijke.

--
Language & Inference Technology Group  *  http://lit.science.uva.nl
ILLC * U. Amsterdam * Nieuwe Achtergracht 166 * 1018 WV Amsterdam
The Netherlands  * Ph: +31 20 525 5358/2582  * Fax: +31 20 525 2800