[Corpora-List] Post-doctoral position - France Telecom Research & Development

[DUCLAYE Florence RD-TECH-LAN]

POST-DOCTORAL POSITION IN PERSONALIZED INFORMATION RETRIEVAL IN NATURAL LANGUAGE

Company : France Telecom, Research & Development Division.
Location : Lannion, Brittany, France.
Laboratory : EASY (Service Enriching for Easy Access to Information).
Contract : one-year position starting before December 10th 2006.

France Telecom’s Research and Development Division, situated in Lannion (Brittany, France) has opened a post-doctoral position to work on natural language information retrieval, within an international research project.

The research subject belongs to the field of multimedia information retrieval via natural language interaction on a mobile phone. The search engine produced within the European project will route each user’s request towards a dedicated service containing a database accessible online. It will use natural language interaction with the user in order to pre-fill a form used to send a query to the database. It will then process the results of this query before presenting them to the user. The objective of this post-doctorate is to provide the search engine with capacities to adapt itself to the user, to make the interaction more effective. In other words, the search engine is expected to be able to automatically and progressively adapt its reactions to each user, or group of users. In a first time, the successful candidate will accomplish a reflection and bibliographical work on the possible means to personalize a method of information retrieval. This candidate will also identify the evaluation criteria that should be optimized in that context. At the same time, he/she will study the technical possibilities to adapt the found elements to the available internal technology. This technology is dedicated to semantic-based, flexible querying of knowledge bases. The successful candidate will notably take part in the design of a user model and to the construction of an ontology of a specialised domain based on a corpus. In a second time, the results of this research work will be implemented (work on knowledge management algorithms, on semantic distance measures, etc). The process of personalization of the retrieval will be thoroughly evaluated, both qualitatively and quantitatively.

- PhD or equivalent.
- Good programming skills (Java, C).
- Good working knowledge of ontologies, knowledge management and lexical semantics.
- Experience in human/machine dialogue will be appreciated.
- Taste for teamwork.
- Fluent in English, preferably good level in French.

Please send your CV and application letter to :
florence.duclaye at orange-ft.com