[Corpora-List] PHD Thesis Opportunity in NLP at Montpellier (France)

[Violaine PRINCE]

Dear colleagues
Would you kindly post the following annoucement to the Corpora List ?  
It might interest a few members.
Thank you very much.
Prof. Violaine PRINCE
University Montpellier 2 FRANCE

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PhD Thesis Opportunity (Autumn 2008)

  Contribution of Syntactic Analysis to Machine Translation

Machine Translation has tremendously progressed in tasks such as  
lexical transfer (word translation), idiomatic expressions, with the  
help of statistical lexical techniques,  advanced multilingual  
resources and the availability of aligned corpora. Nowadays, the new  
challenge is to extend these skills to correct sentences building in  
the target language, in order to produce grammatically acceptable  
texts. Several methods are competing in this field: Surface structure  
generators from a pivot representation as well as numerous grammatical  
structures and sentence style learning techniques, using corpora.

The subject of this PhD thesis consists in studying, theoretically as  
well as experimentally, the source language syntactic analysis  
(through parsing) contribution to the generation of grammatically  
correct sentences in the target language. Some of our team  
contributions (namely Chauché and Prince 2006, Bonnin and Prince 2007,  
available at the LIRMM the on-line documentation HAL ), show that the  
syntactic generation of the target language, if the latter is not very  
far from the source (pairs such as English-German, French-English,  
French-Spanish...), might be obtained through the source language   
units syntactic structure transformation.

The goals of this work include but are not restricted to:

Extending, enhancing  and refurbishing the existing transformation  
rules and models suggested in the cited words, possibly through  
learning these transformations from aligned data.

Building a transformation grammar, from the existing French to English  
translation protoype SYGFtoE. This grammar must result from a  
theoretical and algorithmical reworking of the structures learnt in  
step 1.

Evaluating this work with corpora.

Application: Candidates must apply at Pr. Dony's following URL : http://www.lirmm.fr/~iss/specdoctinfo/InfoCandidatureAlloc.html 
   before May, 30th.

A good level in NLP and fluency in French are  highly recommended.

Contact : prince at lirmm.fr

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