Employment opportunities posted 2009

• This is an archive of employment opportunities that were posted in 2009.

Research Scientist, Natural Language Processing, Educational Testing Service, Princeton, NJ, USA

• Employer: Educational Testing Service, Princeton, NJ, USA
• Title: Research Scientist, Natural Language Processing
• Specialty: Software development, NLP, Machine Learning, Educational Applications
• Deadline: Open until filled
• Date Posted: December 15, 2009
• Links to website: [1]

Headquartered in Princeton, NJ, ETS is the world’s premier educational measurement institution and a leader in educational research. As an innovator in developing achievement and occupational tests for clients in business, education and government, we are determined to advance educational excellence for the communities we serve.

ETS Research & Development has an immediate opening for an Associate Research Scientist in the Center for Automated Scoring and Natural Language Processing. This position will be responsible for a mixture of operational and research efforts related to ETS’s automated scoring technologies housed in the Automated Scoring and Natural Language Processing group. These technologies include automated essay scoring (e-rater®), scoring short answers for correctness of content (c-rater™), mathematical equations and plots (m-rater™), and scoring the spontaneous speech of English Language Learners (SpeechRater™).

Responsibilities of the position include, but are not limited to:

• Providing scientific and technical skills in conceptualizing, designing, obtaining support for, conducting, managing and disseminating results of research projects in the field of natural language processing (NLP) or portions of large-scale research studies or programs in the same field.
• Developing and/or modifying NLP theories to conceptualize and implement new capabilities in automated scoring and NLP analysis and evaluation systems that are used to improve assessments, learning tools and test development practices.
• Applying scientific, technical and software engineering skills in designing and conducting research studies and capability development in support of educational products and services.
• Developing and overseeing the conduct of selected portions of research proposals and project budgets.
• Designing and conducting complex scientific studies functioning as an expert in major facets of the projects.
• Assisting in the conduct of research projects by accomplishing directed tasks according to schedule and within budget.
• Participating in dissemination activities through the publication of research papers, progress and technical reports; the presentation of seminars; or other appropriate communication vehicles.
• Developing professional relationships as a representative, consultant or advisor to external advisory and policy boards and councils, research organizations, educational institutions and educators.

Requirements:

• Ph.D. in Natural Language Processing, Computational Linguistics or Computer Science with an emphasis on issues in syntactic and/or semantic analysis of text is desired.
• Familiarity with the application of NLP tools to educational problems; a very strong statistical background and solid experience with machine learning algorithms and tools would be an asset.
• Demonstrable contributions to new and/or modified theories of natural language processing and their implementation in automated systems required.
• Practical expertise with NLP tools and fluency in at least one major programming language (e.g., Java, Perl, C/C++, Python) are also required.

ETS offers competitive salaries, outstanding benefits, a stimulating work environment and attractive growth potential. ETS is an Equal Opportunity, Affirmative Action Employer.

How to Apply:

Please visit our Careers page at www.ETS.org and apply directly for position #79756. Please include a cover letter stating job title and salary requirements.

Senior Software Systems Engineer (NLP), Educational Testing Service, Princeton, NJ, USA

• Employer: Educational Testing Service, Princeton, NJ, USA
• Title: Senior Software Systems Engineer
• Specialty: Software development, NLP, Machine Learning, Educational Applications
• Deadline: Open until filled
• Date Posted: December 2, 2009
• Contact: Derrick Higgins dhiggins AT ets DOT org
• Links to website: [2]

The Educational Testing Service has a group of about 12 researchers dedicated to natural language processing and speech analysis. Much of this work focuses on methods for automatically scoring responses (such as essays or monologues) to open-ended test items, or to providing instructional feedback to test takers based on their responses. A selected bibliography of the group’s work can be found at http://ets.org/research/erater.html.

We are currently looking to hire a software engineer with a strong NLP background. The official job posting, together with application instructions, is at: http://ets.pereless.com/careers/index.cfm?fuseaction=83080.viewjobdetail&CID=83080&JID=79723&type=main&cfcend (You can also go to http://ets.pereless.com/careers/index.cfm, and search for Job ID 79723.)

Qualified candidates should

• be highly skilled in Java, Perl, and Python programming
• be familiar with UNIX tools and scripting languages
• have a demonstrated commitment to software development best practices, including documentation, reusable code design, and integrated software testing
• have a strong grasp of computational algorithms and elementary statistics

Ideal candidates should also have experience with natural language processing and speech processing applications. Desired qualifications include:

• An understanding of different statistical classification techniques, and the strengths and weaknesses of each
• A grasp of the levels of linguistic analysis (syntax, semantics, morphology, phonology) and typical computational approaches applied at each level in corpus-based research
• Experience with machine learning toolkits such as Weka, Mallet, libsvm, SVMLite, and See5
• Experience with machine learning and natural language processing resources such as WordNet, parsers, taggers, and information retrieval systems

Above all, candidates should be flexible, self-motivated, and team-oriented.

M. Sc. In computer science, computational linguistics, or a related field is highly desirable.

Research Associates in Text Mining (2 posts), National Centre for Text Mining, University of Manchester, UK

• Employer: National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM), University of Manchester, UK
• Title: Research associates in Text Mining (2 posts)
• Specialty: Text Mining, Machine Learning
• Deadline: 14th December, 2009
• Date Posted: 1st December, 2009
• Contact: Prof. Sophia Ananiadou sophia.ananiadou AT manchester.ac.uk
• Links to website: NaCTeM

We are seeking to hire two research Associates in Text Mining to join the National Centre for Text Mining at the School of Computer Science, University of Manchester.

You will join a strong and dynamic team of 19 text miners and software engineers and will customise existing text mining tools and services of the National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM) for improved searching using terminology extraction, named entity recognition and fact extraction from full texts. Other services to be developed include semantic search, summarisation and question-answering facilities for institutional repositories.

You should have a PhD in Computer Science, ideally in Text Mining, or have research experience in text mining at an equivalent level. You should also have experience of active learning machine learning techniques; and have an excellent research profile (publication record).

The posts are available immediately until December 2011.

Salary £28,839 - £35,469 p.a.

To apply, please visit http://www.manchester.ac.uk/aboutus/jobs/research/vacancy/index.htm?ref=167398

Computational Linguistics Engineer, Disney Interactive Media Group (North Hollywood, CA)

• Employer: Disney Interactive Media Group
• Title: Computational Linguistics Engineer
• Specialty: see job description
• Deadline: Open until filled
• Date Posted: Nov 05, 2009
• Contact: Graciel Cecilio graciel.cecilio@disney.com
• Links to website: http://www.dimgcareers.com or http://www.disney.com

As a Sr. Staff Engineer you will be extensively involved in the design and implementation of Disney online communities. Reporting to the Chief Architect of Disney online studios, you will be responsible for the selection, design, architecture, implementation, features, and enhancements to Disney online community language systems. You will also be responsible for giving technical guidance and support to our major online ventures in the area of language base communications and safe uses thereof. This position is key in our efforts to allow for meaningful but safe online environments for a younger audience.

JOB RESPONSIBILITIES

1. Lead and champion the usage of natural language technologies to help Disney provide a safe and meaningful online experience.
2. Procure, design, develop, and document community - communication software components.
3. Provide training, guidance, mentoring and leadership to personnel.
4. Research third-party technologies.
5. Interface with external vendors to coordinate integration of technologies.
6. Interface with product teams to define requirements and schedules for technologies.

QUALIFICATIONS FOR POSITION

1. Degree in Linguistics or related field or 10+ year minimum experience.
2. Degree in Software Development or 10+ years minimum experience
3. A commitment to excellence and ability to help lead Disney in this effort.
4. Have a track record of leveraging natural language methodologies in a real-world, high performance, high scalability on-line environment
5. Strong communication skills.
6. Ability to work closely with profit driven initiatives and incorporate Language based system into these ventures.
7. Proactively researching and evaluating new technologies with the ability to select best methods and techniques.
8. Presenting technical issues, solutions and status to senior and executive management

SPECIFIC SKILLS REQUIRED

1. Computation complexity of natural Language.
2. Language corpus analysis and usage.
3. A love of Fun, Games and Children.
4. A strong appreciation of the Disney brand.

Please send your CV/resume to Graciel Cecilio graciel.cecilio at disney dot com

More about DIMG

Disney Interactive Media Group (DIMG) is the division of The Walt Disney Company responsible for the creation and delivery of Disney branded interactive entertainment and informational content across multiple platforms including online, mobile and video game consoles around the globe.

DIMG oversees several lines of business. Disney Interactive Studios, which has five internal game development studios around the world, self publishes and distributes a broad portfolio of multi-platform video games, mobile games and interactive entertainment worldwide. Disney Online produces Disney.com, the No. 1 kids entertainment and family community Web site, for multiple platforms including PCs and mobile phones, as well as the Disney Family Network of Web sites for moms. Additionally, Disney Online develops and publishes an industry leading suite of online virtual worlds for kids and families. Disney Interactive Studios and Disney Online work together to leverage the platform-specific expertise of the collective group to create a line of interconnected, multiplatform interactive entertainment experiences. Disney Mobile Japan includes the Disney Mobile phone service as well as the region’s highly successful mobile content business. DIMG also develops new online technologies and distribution platforms and operates the online technical backbone and infrastructure that power the Web presence of The Walt Disney Company including category leaders ESPN.com, ABC.com, and ABCNEWS.com. DIMG is headquartered in North Hollywood, Calif., with content available directly or through third parties in many major markets worldwide, including the Americas, Europe, and Asia Pacific.

Trainee position for a computational linguist specialising in multilingual technology, The Language Technology Centre (London, UK)

• Employer: The Language Technology Centre (LTC)
• Title: Computational Linguist
• Specialty: see job description
• Deadline: Open until filled
• Date Posted: Oct 28, 2009
• Contact: Nadia Portera-Zanotti <nadia.portera-zanotti AT langtech.co.uk>

• Links to website: http://www.langtech.co.uk

LTC and Agile Web Solutions are building a web platform with a multilingual technology backend and semantic features in the medical domain. We are looking for a trainee for at least six, ideally 12 months with the possibility of an employment contract afterwards, starting from February 2010 or earlier.

The candidate should be able to do the following:

1. Speak at least 2 of the three languages English, German or Spanish fluently
2. Align bilingual corpora (training can be provided) and populate a statistics based machine translation system and a translation memory system with them
3. Encode terminology in a user dictionary of a rule based machine translation system. This requires knowledge about morphological, syntactic and semantic properties of lexical items and multiword terms and some encoding experience in this respect
4. Test MT output and fine tune system
5. Evaluate machine translation quality using the BLEU score, user response etc.
6. Have basic programming skills in .NET, Java, PHP or similar
7. Work well within a team and liaise with external language technology developers.

Please send your CV and other relevant information per e-mail to Nadia Portera-Zanotti <nadia.portera-zanotti AT langtech.co.uk>

More information is available on our websites: http://www.langtech.co.uk and http://www.agile-web.com

We look forward to receiving your application.

Science Annotator, J.D. Power and Associates, Boulder, CO

• Employer:	Web Intelligence Division, J.D. Power and Associates (McGraw-Hill)
• Title, Rank:	Science Annotator.
• Specialty:	Linguistics, Computational Linguistics.
• Location:	Boulder, Colorado.
• Start date:	The position is available immediately.
• Date Posted:	September 15th, 2009.
• Links to website:	http://jdpowerwebintelligence.com
• Contact:	Miriam Eckert <miriam_eckertNOSPAM@jdpa.com>; Nicolas Nicolov <nicolas_nicolovNOSPAM@jdpa.com> [remove six chars]

J.D. Power and Associates, Web Intelligence division is growing and hiring top-notch science annotators as members of the science team to address creation of datasets for training and testing advanced machine learning algorithms for web mining. We work on cutting-edge text analysis of vast amounts of data, scalable information retrieval, learning semantic concepts and inducing ontologies, sentiment and demographic analysis, and lots of cool new stuff.

Requirements:

• Recent M.A. in Linguistics: knowledge of English grammar (dependency structures), semantics, coreference and anaphora resolution (computational liguistics experience is a plus);

• Native English speaker;

• Experience with UNIX shell scripting, programming experience with scripting languages like Scala, Ruby or Python for formatting datasets, knowledge of XML is a plus;

• Experience with WordNet and ontologies is a plus;

• Prior annotation experience is a plus;

• Excellent reading comprehension and writing skills;

• Strong experience with Microsoft Office applications: MS Excel, PowerPoint, MS-Word;

• Experience with using search engines (Bing, Google, Yahoo! Search);

• Effective communication skills, analitical thinking, and ablity to work independently and in a team environment;

• Fluency in a foreign language is a plus;

• Enthusiam for solving challenging problems.

• Must be located in or willing to relocate to Boulder, Colorado.

• Must be legally authorized to work in the United States.

Associate Professorship in Natural Language Processing, University of Oslo

• Employer: Department of Informatics, University of Oslo
• Title: Associate Professor (tenured)
• Specialization: data-driven and hybrid approaches to NLP
• Deadline: Friday, October 9, 2009
• Announcement: job posting

Text Mining Positions, JULIE Lab (Germany)

• Employer: JULIE Lab, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Germany
• Title: Post doc or Ph.D.
• Specialty: NLP
• Deadline: Open until filled
• Date Posted: Aug 26, 2009
• Contact: Katrin Tomanek <katrin.tomanek@uni-jena.de>

• Links to website: JULIE Lab Web Site

The Jena University Language & Information Engineering (JULIE) Lab has two vacant text mining positions available, a Post Doc and a Ph.D. position, to boost its research efforts in advanced text analytics, i.e., named entity and relation extraction, knowledge discovery from texts. Annual salary ranges from 40,000 – 45,000 € (approximately 60,000 $) for the post doc position and 35,000 – 40,000 € (approximately 55,000 $) for the Ph.D. position, both dependent on previous work experience. JULIE Lab has a strong reputation in biomedical information extraction and text mining and is an international leader in research in the field of text analytics (please, visit http://www.julielab.de).

Requirements for Candidates:

• outstanding degree in computational linguistics/language technology or related fields in computer science (information retrieval, data mining, artificial intelligence, machine learning, information systems, human-computer interaction, Semantic Web, etc.) from a major school/department/university
• necessary: good proficiency in statistics and machine learning methodologies
• desired: solid information extraction/text mining skills
• excellent programming skills (Java), awareness of software engineering discipline in coding (UIMA, coding conventions, SE tools, etc.)
• background knowledge in the life sciences (can also be acquired or deepened while staying in the lab)
• strong dedication to scientific excellence

Informal inquiries can be addressed to: Katrin Tomanek, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Email: katrin.tomanek@uni-jena.de

Applications (e-mail preferred) should be sent to: Prof. Dr. Udo Hahn, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, 07743 Jena, Fürstengraben 30, Germany, Email: udo.hahn@uni-jena.de

Programmer Analyst, Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA, USA)

• Employer: Linguistic Data Consortium, University of Pennsylvania
• Title: Programmer Analyst (Ref #: 090727106)
• Specialty: Language Resource Creation, Natural Language Processing
• Deadline: Open untill filled
• Date Posted: Aug 12, 2009
• Contact: Kazuaki Maeda <maeda@ldc.upenn.edu>

• Links to website: Online Application LDC Web Site

Linguistic Data Consortium at the University of Pennsylvania has an immediate opening for a full-time programmer analyst to support our rapidly growing linguistic resource creation projects, including the DARPA Machine Reading program.

Duties: This position will support multiple, concurrent language resource creation projects by providing programming, technical and research support in a lead capacity. Working with internal and external stakeholders, the position will develop achievable technical roadmaps for each project and will oversee their execution.

Tasking may include:

1. design and develop flexible user interfaces for manual annotation of linguistic data
2. prepare linguistic resources for annotation, including indexing and format normalization
3. negotiate project technical specifications with key internal and external stakeholders
4. develop data formats to support collection and annotation tasks
5. research, evaluate and integrate third-party software into LDC's data production pipeline
6. perform statistical analysis of linguistic data
7. train and supervise full-time or part-time technical staff
8. assist with corpus publication including data validation and sanity checks
9. provide technical support to linguistic annotators and other project staff
10. represent technical aspects of LDC's linguistic resource creation efforts at workshops and in publications, as required.

This position is contingent upon funding. For further information or to apply online, please go to Online Application. The University of Pennsylvania is an affirmative action/equal opportunity employer.

Research Programmer, University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois

• Employer: University of Illinois, Urbana, Illinois
• Title: Research Programmer
• Specialty: Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Web Programming
• Deadline: July 10, 2009-
• Date Posted: June 21, 2009
• Contact: Jennifer Dittmar at 217-244-6241
• Links to website: [3]

   Visiting Research Programmer
   Department of Computer Science
   University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
   Extended and Revised Search

The Department of Computer Science is seeking a Visiting Research Programmer to take part in the development of Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning technologies embedded in a Web-based application.

This position requires knowledge in one or more of the following: information retrieval techniques and tools, natural language processing, language models, machine learning techniques, and web programming (e.g., browsers plug-ins). Algorithmic maturity and experience dealing with large amounts of data are essential. Outstanding attention to detail is required, along with strong written and verbal communication skills and the ability to quickly learn new technologies. The Visiting Research Programmer will join the Cognitive Computation Group led by Prof. Dan Roth, to work on a standalone project with possibilities for commercialization.

Job Duties include:

   * Designing and implementing algorithms, software systems and user interfaces
   * Writing design documents and code documentation
   * Interacting with other group members and presenting technical information

A minimum of a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field is required. Individuals with a more advanced degree are encouraged to apply and salary will be commensurate with level of education and experience. This position will be available as soon as possible after the closing date, and is a 12-month, temporary, full-time academic professional appointment with standard University benefits with the possibility of becoming permanent at a future date. Salary is commensurate with education and experience. For full consideration, applications should be received by 7/10/09. Applicants may be interviewed before the closing date; however, no hiring decision will be made until after that date.

To apply, please submit your application online at: http://www.cs.uiuc.edu/join/aponlap.html.

If you do not have Internet access, please call Jennifer Dittmar at 217-244-6241 to make other arrangements for submitting your application. Refer to search #12309 in all communications.

Minorities, women, and other designated class members are encouraged to apply.

The University of Illinois is an Affirmative Action-Equal Opportunity Employer.

Postdoc or doctoral research assistant, Bremen University, Bremen, Germany

• Employer: Bremen University, Bremen, Germany
• Title: Research assistant (Postdoc or doctoal level)
• Specialty: Dialogue Systems and Human-Robot Interaction
• Deadline: June 15, 2009
• Date Posted: May 17, 2009
• Contact: John Bateman <bateman@uni-NOSPAM-bremen.de> [remove 6 chars]
• Links to website: | Research Position

The I5-DiaSpace project of the Collaborative Research Center on Spatial Cognition in Bremen, N. Germany, is looking for a computational linguistic or informatics PhD or Postdoc researcher ready and willing to take on the further development of our information-state based dialogue system. The system backbone is implemented in Java with plug-ins to state of the art natural language analysis, generation, dialogue management, and knowledge representation components. The system offers an outstanding foundation for carrying out further research at both doctoral and postdoc levels. The successful applicant will be expected to take over responsibility for system design and implementation, and so excellent programming skills will be crucial. The selection of research topic within the general area of dialogue systems is open to negotiation, although spatially-situated dialogue with autonomous systems including robots is one of the demonstration areas that we cover. The position is to be filled as quickly as possible.

The Natural Language Interaction Group at Bremen is a highly multidisciplinary team combining discourse analysts, psycholinguists, computational linguists and ontological engineers. We work in close cooperation with several projects within the Collaborative Research Center, which spans cognitive science, neurocognition, perception, formal spatial calculi, architecture, and AI. The environment is highly international and at the cutting edge of several related disciplines.

Requirements:

• completed first degree in computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, linguistics, informatics or similar

• interest in dialogue

• very good programming skills (necessarily Java; Lisp, Perl, etc. advantageous)

• good English writing skills

• ability to work both independently and in a team in a multidisciplinary environment

Approximate salary:

Payment is according to the German Federal pay scale (TV-L 13, approx. 34,000 Euros annually). The position is full-time.

Interested applicants should send their CV and any supporting information or further queries to John Bateman at the above contact address.

Scientist I, J.D. Power and Associates, Boulder, CO

• Employer:	Web Intelligence Division, J.D. Power and Associates (McGraw-Hill)
• Title, Rank:	Scientist I.
• Specialty:	Machine Learning, Computational Linguistics, Natural Language Processing.
• Location:	Boulder, Colorado.
• Start date:	The position is available immediately.
• Date Posted:	May 1st, 2009.
• Links to website:	http://jdpowerwebintelligence.com
• Contact:	Nicolas Nicolov <nicolas_nicolovNOSPAM@jdpa.com> [remove six chars]

J.D.Power and Associates is growing and hiring top-notch scientists to develop cutting-edge web mining technology. Our science team is working on advanced text analysis of vast amounts of data, scalable information retrieval, learning semantic concepts and lots of cool new stuff.

Requirements:

• Recent Ph.D. in Machine Learning, Computational Linguistics, Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science or equivalent.

• Strong statistical, natural language processing, machine learning background with emphasis on coreference, meronymy, dependency parsing, sentiment/opinion analysis, text clustering and categorization, graph analysis.

• Experience with scientific computing on large datasets, natural language processing, information extraction, information retrieval, multilingual datasets, distributed systems is a plus.

• Strong experience with C++/Java, Scala/Ruby/Python development of large software systems, Linux/Windows environments.

• Proven track record of publications/patents preferred.

• Multilingual processing is a plus.

• Strong verbal and written communication skills; UML, LaTEX, beamer.

• At least 4 years of research experience (relevant university experience - ok).

• Enthusiasm for solving challenging problems.

Research Position in Computational Linguistics at Austrian Research Institute for AI (OFAI), Vienna

• Employer: OFAI, Vienna, Austria
• Title: Researcher
• Specialty: Computational Linguistics
• Deadline: April 15, 2009
• Date Posted: March 30, 2009
• Links to website: [4]

The Austrian Research Institute for Artificial Intelligence (OFAI) in Vienna, Austria offers two research positions in its Language Technology group.

Candidates are expected to have a degree in computational linguistics or computer science with a background in language technology. She/he will be an open minded team worker, who is able to work creatively in an interdisciplinary context. She/he will have good programming skills and be able to flexibly use different programming languages. She/he likes to to work in a research environment constantly learning and developing fresh concepts and ideas. Publishing research results is part of the job and actively encouraged. The successful candidates will have a strong background in one or more of the following areas: ontology engineering, semantic systems, text mining and machine learning.

Fluency in English is expected.

Both positions are in the framework of a project aiming at advancing speech recognition by the integration of (context-dependent) semantic knowledge. The project is ongoing and will continue until April 2010.

Contracts will be for the duration of the project. Continued employment after the end of the project is possible.

Depending on academic credentials and experience of the candidate, the yearly gross salary will be in the range of EUR 42000 - 54000.

Both positions are to be filled asap.

Please mail applications including a CV to Harald Trost <harald.trost@ofai.at>

Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Institut de Recherche en Informatique de Toulouse (IRIT) Université de Toulouse 3

Subject : Applying learning techniques to discourse analysis

Période : 12 months, September 2009 -> August 2010

Context : This postdoctoral fellowship, is part of the ANR project ANNODIS, which includes the labs: IRIT (Université de Toulouse 3), CLLE (Université de Toulouse 2), and GREYC Université de Caen). The goal of this project is to build a corpus of French texts annotated with discourse structure at several levels. The project also has the goal of providing automatic and semi-automatic tools for helping with this task.

The postdoctoral fellow will be a member of the IRIT lab at l'université de Toulouse 3, Toulouse, in the research group Lilac under the direction of Nicholas Asher.

Objectives : Based on the data culled from the manual annotation of our corpus, the first objective of the postdoctoral fellow will be to design and supervise experiments for the automatic recovery of the discourse structure of a text and to evaluate the feasibility of semi supervised and supervised learning strategies given the data in the corpus. A discourse structure is a graph where the nodes are text segments and the arcs are discourse relations. Thus, the extraction task has three stages: 1) finding the segments, 2) determining the attachment points for segments in the graph et 3) determining the discourse relation or relations between the attached segments.

The postdoctoral fellow will also be in charge of the final collection and organization of the manual annotation data.

Candidate should have: - a Ph.D. - competence in NLP and/or information extraction, and automated learning methods.

A familiarity with theories of discourse structure would be a Plus.

Salary: 3000 euro per month

Candidates should send a dossier with a detailed CV (pdf) by email to:

asher@irit.fr AND muller@irit.fr.

Post-Doctoral Position in Computational Linguistics at Uppsala University

• Employer: Uppsala University, Sweden
• Title: Research Fellow
• Specialty: Computational Linguistics
• Deadline: April 24, 2009
• Date Posted: March 17, 2009
• Links to website: | Post-Doc Position

This is a full-time, limited-term position that can maximally be extended up to four years. The position involves a small amount of teaching and supervision but is mainly devoted to research. The deadline for applications is April 14, 2009. For more information, contact Joakim Nivre <joakim.nivre@lingfil.uu.se>.

Research Positions, Human Language Technology Center of Excellence

• Employer: Human Language Technology Center of Excellence (at Johns Hopkins University)
• Titles: Postdoctoral researchers, research staff, professors on sabbaticals, visiting scientists
• Specialty: Speech and Natural Language Processing
• Deadline: April 1, 2009
• Date Posted: March 12, 2009
• Links to website: | Research Position

The Human Language Technology Center of Excellence (COE) at the Johns Hopkins University is seeking to hire outstanding Ph.D. researchers in the field of speech and natural language processing. The COE seeks the most talented candidates for both junior and senior level positions including, but not limited to, full-time research staff, professors on sabbaticals, visiting scientists and post-docs. Candidates will be expected to work in a team setting with other researchers and graduate students at the Johns Hopkins University, the University of Maryland College Park and other affiliated institutions.

Candidates should have a strong background in one of the following areas:

- NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING: Information extraction, knowledge distillation, machine translation, semantic annotation, text processing, etc.

- SPEECH PROCESSING: Robust speech recognition across language channel, formal vs. informal genres, speaker identification, language identification, speech retrieval, spoken term detection, etc.

- MACHINE LEARNING: Learning on very large datasets and streams for text and/or speech, feature extraction, domain adaptation, semi-supervised learning

The COE was founded in January 2007 and has a long-term research contract as an independent center within Johns Hopkins University. Located next to Johns Hopkins’ Homewood Campus in Baltimore, Maryland, the COE’s distinguished contract partners include the University of Maryland College Park, the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab, and BBN Technologies of Cambridge, Massachusetts. World-class researchers at the COE focus on fundamental challenge problems critical to finding solutions for real-world problems of importance to our government sponsor. The COE offers substantial computing capability for research that requires heavy computation and massive storage. In the summer of 2009, the COE will hold its first annual Summer Camp for Advanced Language Exploration (SCALE), inviting the best and brightest researchers to work on common areas in speech and NLP. Researchers are expected to publish in peer-reviewed venues.

Applicants should have earned a Ph.D. in Computer Science or a closely related field. Applicants should submit a curriculum vitae, research statement, names and addresses of at least four references, and an optional teaching statement. Please send applications and inquiries about the position to hltcoe-hiring@jhu.edu.

While applications will be evaluated as received until the position is filled, applicants are strongly encouraged to indicate intent to apply by contacting the center before April 1, 2009. U.S. Citizenship is required and applicants should note citizenship status on their application. Additionally, security clearance is required and the COE will seek a clearance for those who do not already have one. The Johns Hopkins University is an equal opportunity employer and has a smoke-free environment.

Chair and Lectureship in Computing Science, Aberdeen

• Employer: University of Aberdeen
• Titles: Chair (full professor), Lecturer (assistant professor)
• Specialty: See full adverts. Areas include multi-modal interaction and natural language generation
• Deadline: April 13, 2009
• Date Posted: February 26, 2009
• Links to website: | Chair position | Lectureship position | Research at Aberdeen

Natural Language Generation Group, The Open University: Research Associate, Text-to-Text Generation/Dialogue

• Employer: The Open University
• Title: Research Associate
• Specialty: Text-to-Text Generation/Dialogue
• Deadline: February 15, 2009
• Date Posted: February 3, 2009
• Link to website: job details and application form

Postdoctoral and research engineer positions available at the Singapore Management University

The School of Information Systems at the Singapore Management University is seeking to fill a few postdoctoral and research engineer positions for the projects "Transfer Learning for Adaptive Relation Extraction" and "Mining Interaction Behaviors from Information Exchange Networks." These are two-year projects supported by the Singapore Defense Science Organization, starting in April 2009.

The goal of the first project is to develop adaptive learning algorithms for relation extraction from free text. In real applications of relation extraction, there is often insufficient training data available for the target relations in the target domain, but labeled data from related domains or for related relation types can be borrowed. The research questions to be answered are therefore (1) how existing transfer learning algorithms can be applied in the particular context of relation extraction, (2) how human knowledge can be incorporated, and (2) what new transfer learning techniques are needed for adaptive relation extraction.

The goal of the second project is to study characterization and measurement of interaction behaviors in information exchange networks based on user-generated interaction data. We will focus on information exchange networks which involve actors sending information to one another. Examples of such networks include email and blog networks. The research will focus on interaction behaviors that suggest actor roles in an information exchange network and may infer relationships between actors in the network.

The postdoctoral candidate must have completed all requirements for his/her PhD degree by the time of appointment. The research engineer candidate must have completed a good undergraduate or master degree in computer science or computer engineering. The ideal candidates are expected to have the following skills/qualifications:

 - Knowledge and experience in machine learning, data mining and statistics/probabilities
 - Strong programming skills
 - Proficiency in English

For the first project, we also prefer candidates with

 - Knowledge and experience in natural language processing
 - Experience with information extraction, transfer learning and/or semi-supervised learning is a plus

For the second project, we also prefer candidates with

 - Knowledge in social network analysis and web mining

The salary for the postdoctoral position will be around 5,000 SGD per month. The salary for the research engineer position will be based on the candidate’s working experience and academic degree.

To apply for the positions, send your full CV with list of publications, names and contact information of two referees, a statement of research qualifications and interests, and two sample publications (if any) to the following principle investigators:

 1. Transfer Learning for Adaptive Relation Extraction: Jing Jiang (jingjiang@smu.edu.sg). 
 2. Mining Interaction Behaviors from Information Exchange Networks: Ee-Peng Lim (eplim@smu.edu.sg).

Tenure Track Faculty Position: Assistant/Associate Professor in Human Computer Interaction, Montclair State University, NJ, USA

Vacancy #: 	 	VF-22
Department:	 	Computer Science

The Department of Computer Science invites applications for a tenure track position in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) and Visualization. The Department’s 13 faculty members support the BS in Computer Science with an ABET CAC accredited track, the BS in Information Technology and the MS in Computer Science. The position requires a willingness to teach a variety of computer science and information technology courses at all levels to ethnically diverse students. The position entails the ability to work as a member of interdisciplinary teams as the Department develops and modifies computing undergraduate and graduate programs with a planned doctoral program in computational science. In addition, the successful candidate will develop and maintain an active research program with student involvement.

Qualifications & Requirements: Candidates must have a Ph.D. in computer Science or a very closely related discipline. Candidates must have expertise in Human Computer Interaction with preference to candidates with experience in software engineering, interfaces, and visualization, and research in HCI. Candidates must have good communication skills. We are looking for candidates with experience in teaching undergraduate computing courses and in working as a member of a team. All faculty are expected to have an ongoing research program, to commit to quality teaching, to be involved in professional activities, and to pursue external funding to support their scholarship.

Salary Range:             Salary and range is dependent on qualifications.
Anticipated Start Date:   September 1, 2009

Send letter and resume to (include vacancy # if above): Send hardcopy (no email documents) that includes C.V., at least three professional references, statement of research interests, teaching philosophy with experience, and professional goals to:

Search Committee — V- F22 Department of Computer Science Montclair State University Montclair, NJ 07043

(include V number) and professional goals to: Search Committee — V- F22 Department of Computer Science Montclair State University Montclair, NJ 07043

Apply By: Screening begins immediately and continues until the position is filled.

Montclair State is a New Jersey State university. It is located 14 miles west of New York City.

Internship on Textual Entailment Applied to Statistical Machine Translation, Xerox Research Centre Europe, Grenoble - France

The main research lines within the Cross Language Technologies (CLT) area at XRCE are Statistical Machine Translation, Cross-Lingual Information Retrieval and Machine Learning Techniques for Cross-Lingual Applications. CLT is currently coordinating the European Project SMART (Statistical Multilingual Analysis for Retrieval and Translation) [5].

XRCE has received funding from the PASCAL-2 Network of Excellence [6] for conducting, in partnership with Bar-Ilan University in Israel, a "Pump Priming" project on the topic of "Context Models for Textual Entailment and their Application to Statistical Machine Translation". One of the goals of the project is to investigate situations in which, while a translation system may not have enough knowledge to adequately translate a source text into a target text, it may be able to do so based on entailment rules learned from monolingual data.

We are looking for preferably one (in this case the internship would be for 10 months ) or two interns (in this case each internship would last 5 months with the first starting at the beginning of 2009) to work on this topic under the supervision of XRCE researchers, and in collaboration with our partners. The focus of the work will be on the following topics:

• Integration of existing paraphrase and entailment resources into SMT settings, and assessment of their applicability in this domain;
• Development (in collaboration with our partners) of novel models for assessing the validity of entailment rules in context and implementation of SMT-based modules that are able to exploit such rules;
• Methodology and measures for controlling the use of directional and bi-directional entailment rules in SMT;
• Use of entailment knowledge for evaluating the performance of SMT systems.

The ideal candidate will be a strong Master or Ph.D. student with background in statistical machine translation and/or statistical methods in NLP. The candidate will be fluent in C/C++ and/or Python. Some knowledge and practice of Machine Learning models and tools will be a plus, as will be some previous acquaintance with work on Textual Entailment.

Contact:

• Lucia Specia: lucia.specia@xrce.xerox.com
• Marc Dymetman: marc.dymetman@xrce.xerox.com

For more information: http://www.xrce.xerox.com/internships/LS-MD.TE-SMT_2009.2008.html