Sujet de these: 2 open PhD positions in Natural Language Processing, Marseille, France

[Thierry Hamon]

Date: Tue, 18 Jun 2013 15:31:53 +0200
From: Frederic Bechet <frederic.bechet at lif.univ-mrs.fr>
Message-ID: <51C06149.8040209 at lif.univ-mrs.fr>


PhD positions - Computer Science, Natural Language Processing - 
Marseille, France

The NLP group of the Laboratoire d'Informatique Fondamentale of the Aix
Marseille University has 2 open PhD positions in Computer Science in the
context of an European project (3 years).

Location : Campus de Luminy 
(http://sciences.univ-amu.fr/sites-geographiques/site-luminy), 
Marseille, France
Starting : October 1st 2013
Deadline for application: July 15th 2013

The two fully funded PhD studentships will focus on 2 different aspects
of the project:

1- Discourse parsing of speech.
This PhD will focus on developing discourse analysis methods adapted to
a large range of conversational styles and domains from spoken
conversations to social media interaction. Automatic methods will be
studied for five types of discourse analysis: discourse parsing, event
and temporal structure, argumentation structure and intra-document
coreference. The applicative domain of this research will be the
automatic summarization task of human-human dialogs. The language
targeted will be French and English.

2- Syntactic and semantic parsing with deep learning methods.
Recently, neural network approaches based on a deep learning paradigm
has been successfully applied to some NLP tasks such as POS and NE
tagging or dependency parsing (
http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrusted_dlcp/research.google.com/de//pubs/archive/35671.pdf
). In this PhD we will investigate how this paradigm performs and can be
adapted in the context of robust syntactic and semantic parsing of human
human conversations collected on social media platforms and telephone
call centres.

The successful candidates should :
- hold a relevant degree in the field of Natural Language Processing or
  Machine Learning.
- have good algorithmic and programming skills

Description of the lab:
The University of Aix-Marseille (AMU) is currently one of the largest
university in France, created in 2012 from the fusion of the 3 former
Aix-Marseille universities (Université de Provence, Université de la
Méditerranée, Université Paul Cézanne).
The LIF (Fundamental Computer Science Lab), is a JRU between the Centre
National de la Recherhe Scientifique (CNRS) and AMU. The Natural
Language Processing group of LIF aims at developing symbolic and
statistical methods for the automatic processing of textual and speech
data. The two main characteristics of this research group are: (1) to
host both linguists working on the development of rich linguistic
resources such as syntactic and semantic lexicons and computer
scientists with a very strong experience in numerical approaches for
NLP; and (2) to work on both spoken and written languages, at the
descriptive level as well as the application level thanks to a strong
expertise of some members of the group in Automatic Speech Recognition
methods.

Contacts:
Alexis Nasr : alexis.nasr at lif.univ-mrs.fr
Frederic Bechet : frederic.bechet at lif.univ-mrs.fr
Benoit Favre : benoit.favre at lif.univ-mrs.fr

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