Employment opportunities, postdoctoral positions, summer jobs

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• See also the Linguist Job List.
• Archived postings:
  • 2011 - 2010 - 2009 - 2008 - 2007

Research Associate Position at Educational Testing Service

• Employer: Educational Testing Service (www.ets.org)
• Job Title: Research Associate
• Location: Princeton, NJ
• Deadline: Open until filled
• Date Posted: 28-Jan-2012
• Application Website
• Contact email: dyanchuk@ets.org

JOB DESCRIPTION

Educational Testing Service has an opening for a Research Associate position in the Research Coordination and Support Group. The successful candidate will primarily provide support to Research Scientists working on a branch of computer science and computational linguistics known as Natural Language Processing (NLP) by assisting in the management of resources across numerous projects, leading communication efforts both internally and externally, and participating in all phases of research projects, including research design, project management, data collection and analysis. He or she will also collaborate with researchers in responding to external requests for information, external grant applications, and in preparing study results for publication or presentation.

BASIC FUNCTIONS AND RESPONSIBILITIES

• Provide full professional support to and collaborate with a Director of Research; Senior Research Scientists; and Research Scientists.

• Participate in planning, management, and design of research. Serve as co-investigator in research areas; collaborate on research projects.

• Plan and manage annotations for a variety of projects.

• Design and develop plans for data collection; oversee data collection, reduction, and analysis; evaluate availability and usefulness of data; identify and collect additional data necessary for completing research projects.

• Monitor collection and quality of data; provide comprehensive review of data collected from field sites to ensure completeness and accuracy; oversee entry of data for computer analysis.

• Design original research instruments and methods and applications of research.

• Write, rewrite, and edit proposals, professional reports, research instruments, books (or sections thereof), speeches, handbooks, research articles, and correspondence. Specifically, develop standardized materials such as PowerPoint slides, capability descriptions, and research study templates for use in communicating about automated scoring capabilities; develop boilerplate text for external audiences and proposals; and craft proposal text on demand, based on existing standard materials and input from automated scoring researchers.

• Conduct or assist in direction and management of research projects. Conduct research of his or her own design, under general oversight of assigned supervisor. Manage resources across a wide-range of studies designed to support or enhance automated scoring technologies. Recruit and hire field staff; develop and monitor project budgets; coordinate and supervise field staff and consultants.

• Conduct literature searches; review current research on research models and methods; review and evaluate ongoing developments in automated scoring research; and evaluate evolving business needs. Perform independent analyses of information by reading, summarizing, and evaluating it preliminary to undertaking research. Update standard materials as needed, based on new developments in research or external conditions.

• Provide training and consultation on computer and systems applications, including customized annotation systems. Train and instruct staff on methods and procedures for annotation, data presentation, and explain methods of implementation to technical staff.

• Contact, establish, and develop relationships with research community and with data sources.

• Arrange and attend conferences and meetings; present research findings at professional meetings.

EXPERIENCE AND SKILLS

EDUCATION

A Master's degree in linguistics, computer science, and/or natural language processing (NLP) is necessary.

EXPERIENCE

The successful candidate will have four years of progressively responsible research experience in linguistics or natural language processing. Candidates must demonstrate the ability to craft high-quality written communications for technical and non-technical audiences and have experience managing a large number of concurrent projects.

APPLYING

Interested parties can apply for the position through the following website:

http://ets.pereless.com/careers/index.cfm?fuseaction=83080.viewjobdetail&CID=83080&JID=122972&BUID=2538

If there are any questions, please contact:

Dave Yanchuk (609) 406-5291 dyanchuk@ets.org

Postdoc Position at HRL Laboratories

• Employer: HRL Laboratories, LLC
• Job Title: POST DOC RESEARCH STAFF - Social Media Analysis & Data Mining
• Location: Malibu, CA
• Deadline: Open until filled
• Date Posted: 26-Jan-2012
• Contact email: hmoon@hrl.com

HRL Laboratories, LLC. (http://www.hrl.com) has openings for a postdoctoral researcher position in the area of social media analysis / data mining. HRL laboratories is one of the most innovative research organizations in industry. Overlooking the pacific ocean in the hills above Malibu, California, our beautiful surroundings are matched by our capabilities and commitment to being a world-class research and development lab. We collaborate with top researchers in academia to advance the fields of information and systems sciences, sensors and materials, applied electromagnetics, and microelectronics. Please visit http://www.hrl.com/careers/cars_jobs.html for more information. For job considerations, please send your cover letter and CV to hmoon@hrl.com.

Job Description:

EDUCATION DESIRED: Ph.D. in Computer Science, Statistics, EE or related fields

ESSENTIAL JOB FUNCTIONS: Primary job function is to apply statistical data analysis and text processing techniques to problems and applications in data mining. Tasks will include the development, simulation, evaluation, and implementation of algorithms and models. Additional job functions include solving customer problems, writing invention disclosures, publishing papers, briefing customers, and assisting in marketing HRL expertise.

EXPERIENCE DESIRED: Research experience in one or more of the following areas: Text processing, sentiment analysis, data mining, web & social media processing, large-scale data processing, and machine learning. Experience developing innovative solutions based upon the application of relevant research results from a wide variety of sources.

KNOWLEDGE DESIRED: Background in one or more of the following areas: natural language processing, social network analysis, statistical analysis, data mining, strong programming skills, particularly proficient with C/C++, Java, R and/or Matlab. Experience with MapReduce or Hadoop, and proficiency in Spanish/Portuguese language is a plus.

ESSENTIAL PHYSICAL/MENTAL REQUIREMENTS: Good communication (verbal and written) skills, active participation in R&D team activities is required. Able and willing to occasionally travel.

SPECIAL REQUIREMENTS (e.g. driver’s license, special tools or restrictions): U.S. citizenship or permanent resident status required.

We are proud to be an EEO/AA employer M/F/D/V. We maintain a drug-free workplace and perform pre-employment substance abuse testing.

Postdoc Position at Aberdeen University

• Employer: University of Aberdeen
• Rank: Post-doctoral Research fellow
• Speciality: Intelligent Language/Multimodal Interfaces
• Location: Aberdeen, UK
• Deadline: 10-Feb-2012
• Date Posted: 19-Jan-2012
• Contact email: yaji.sripada@abdn.ac.uk

Digital Economy is an RCUK cross-council programme, aimed at realising the transformational impact of ICT for all aspects of business, society and economy. The dot.rural Digital Economy Hub at the University of Aberdeen is one of three large multi-disciplinary research hubs funded through this programme, and commenced its activities in October 2009. The Hub award to Aberdeen is worth £11.8M and will fund five years of activity. The Hub brings together a large team of researchers (70+) working in and across the disciplines of computer science, communications engineering, transport, health, social sciences and environmental sciences. For further details, see: www.dotrural.ac.uk To support our ambitious research programme we are looking to appoint a postdoctoral research fellow to work in the area of intelligent language/ multimodal interfaces. The Research Fellow will help develop and be responsible for natural language generation (NLG) based and other creative forms of on-line communication in a research project on effective communication of river water levels to the public, as well as contributing to interfaces of similar kinds needed for other projects related to natural resource conservation. The successful candidate will have a good knowledge of natural language processing techniques or multimodal interfaces (at the PhD level). They will have some knowledge of NLG and a desire to learn more. The candidate will have a PhD or be about to complete a PhD in Computer Science/ Artificial Intelligence or a relevant discipline. Enthusiasm for digital technology and innovation relevant to society and the economy is essential as is the ability to work in a cross-disciplinary team including colleagues in computer science and engineering. The ability to use GIS would be an advantage. As this post is externally funded it is available for a period of 2.5 years.

For more details

Go to: http://www.abdn.ac.uk/jobs/index.php Click on "External Applicants" Enter the Post Reference Number 1228867 and click "Search"

Postdoc or Research Associate - Natural Language Processing

• Employer: IHMC (www.ihmc.us)
• Rank or Title: Research Associate - Natural Language Processing
• Specialty: Computational Linguistics, Natural Language Processing
• Location: Ocala, FL
• Deadline: Applications accepted until position is filled
• Date Posted: January 3rd, 2012
• Contact email ywilks@ihmc.us

About Us IHMC is a not-for-profit research institute of the Florida University System and is affiliated with several Florida universities. Researchers at IHMC pioneer technologies aimed at leveraging and extending human capabilities. These systems fit the human and machine components together in ways that exploit their respective strengths and mitigate their respective weaknesses. The design and fit of computational prostheses require a broader interdisciplinary range than is typically found in one organization, thus IHMC staff includes computer scientists, cognitive psychologists, neuroscientists, physicians, philosophers, engineers and social scientists of various stripes, as well as some researchers who resist all attempts to classify them. Current active research areas include: knowledge modeling and sharing, adjustable autonomy, robotics, advanced interfaces and displays, communication and collaboration, computer-mediated learning systems, intelligent data and language understanding, software agents, expertise studies, work practice simulation, knowledge representation, and other related areas. IHMC faculty and staff collaborate extensively with industry and government to develop science and technology that can be enabling with respect to society's broader goals. IHMC researchers receive funding (current funding in force exceeds $25,000,000) from a wide range of government and private sources. IHMC research partners have included: DARPA, NSF, NASA, Army, Navy, Air Force, NIH, DOT, IDEO, Nokia, Sun Microsystems, Microsoft, Boeing, Lockheed, and SAIC, among others.

The candidate will be appointed on a new US Government project on metaphor detection and understanding, due to start in the coming months and run for up to five years. Ocala, Florida is an excellent location, close to Florida’s major university and about an hour from both coasts. IHMC is housed in an excellent, state of the art building in the city center.

Required:

▪ Natural language processing / computational linguistics background. Ideal: metaphor and/or machine learning applications

▪ Substantial skills in processing large scale corpora. Ideal: Java skills and standard statistical procedures.

▪ Ph.D. in computational linguistics / natural language processing or related areas.

Skills and Experience:

▪ 3+ plus years experience in natural language processing / computational linguistics in industry or large scale academic research project.

▪ Expertise in at least some of the following specific NLP areas and topics: question answering, lexical semantics, collocations, terminology extraction, disambiguation, multi-word expressions, (shallow) parsing, named entity recognition, lexical acquisition, paraphrasis acquisition, information extraction, text classification, evaluation methodologies.

▪ Familiarity with existing data resources and tools: Wordnet, POS taggers, parsers, LingPipe, SVMLight, NLTK, Weka, and similar tools.

▪ Ideal: experience with ontologies, RDF, other semantic web resources or tools.

Apply to Yorick Wilks at: ywilks@ihmc.us

Visiting Assistant/Associate/Full Professor - Queens College of CUNY

• Employer: Queens College of the City University of New York
• Location: New York, NY
• Deadline: Review of applications to begin on March 1, 2012
• Website: http://www.cs.qc.cuny.edu/
• Date posted: January 4, 2012

Visiting Assistant/Associate/Full Professor

The Department of Computer Science at Queens College of The City University of New York (CUNY) is pleased to announce a visiting faculty position for academic year 2012-2013, beginning September 1. This is a research-focused temporary position, and we encourage applications from candidates with a successful publication history in machine translation, speech recognition, or other research areas of natural language processing or machine learning.

Both junior and senior researchers are encouraged to apply; compensation and title are commensurate with qualifications and experience. Candidates are expected to collaborate with members of our current faculty in computational linguistics -- either on existing research projects or on new joint endeavors. If interested in teaching experience, the visiting faculty member is also invited to teach one course on a topic closely related to his or her research specialty.

The department's computational linguistics faculty, which include two current NSF CAREER Award winners, participate actively in the Ph.D. programs in computer science and linguistics, based at CUNY Graduate Center. These faculty members have active research grants from the NSF, DARPA, the Army Research Lab, and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research. More information about the growing research community in computational linguistics across CUNY is available on this website: http://nlpatcuny.cs.qc.cuny.edu/

Qualifying candidates must have an earned Ph.D. by August 2012 in computer science, linguistics, or a closely related field, with a demonstrated research record in the areas listed above. Also required are the ability to work with Ph.D. students, interest in productive scholarship, teaching and communication skills, and ability to cooperate with others for the good of the institution.

Candidates should submit a letter of application detailing their teaching, research, and grant writing interests and experience, and a curriculum vitae to:

Dr. Matt Huenerfauth, Search Committee Chair

Department of Computer Science

Queens College-CUNY

65-30 Kissena Blvd.

Flushing, New York 11365-1597

matthew.huenerfauth (at) qc.cuny.edu

Email submissions with PDF attachments are preferred. In addition, please arrange for three current letters of reference to be submitted directly by the recommenders. Review of applications will begin on March 1, 2012, and will continue until the position is filled.

CUNY offers a comprehensive benefits package to employees and eligible dependents based on job title and classification. We are committed to enhancing our diverse academic community by actively encouraging people with disabilities, minorities, veterans, and women to apply. We take pride in our pluralistic community and continue to seek excellence through diversity and inclusion. EO/AA Employer.

Researcher speech/language processing - AT&T Labs, NJ

• Employer: AT&T Labs - Research
• Location: Florham Park, NJ
• Deadline: applications accepted until position is filled
• Website: http://www.research.att.com
• Date posted: 23/12/2011

AT&T Labs - Research

Researcher and Research Software Engineer Positions

AT&T Research, one of the premier industrial research laboratories in the world, is looking for talented individuals to make a difference in the world of communications. Our researchers and research software engineers are dedicated to solving real problems in speech and language processing, and are involved in inventing, creating and deploying innovative services. We also explore fundamental research problems in these areas. Outstanding Ph.D.-level candidates at all levels of experience are encouraged to apply. Candidates must demonstrate excellence in research, a collaborative spirit and strong communication and software skills.

Areas of particular interest are

      * Large-vocabulary automatic speech recognition
      * Acoustic and language modeling
      * Robust speech recognition
      * Signal processing
      * Adaptive learning
      * Pronunciation modeling
      * Natural language understanding and dialog
      * Speaker biometrics
      * Voice and multimodal search
      * Software engineering for speech and language processing

Positions will be based in New Jersey, New York, or California, depending on area of focus.

For more information, visit www.research.att.com and click on "Working with us".

AT&T Companies are Equal Opportunity Employers. All qualified candidates submitting a complete application by January 31, 2012 will receive full and fair consideration for employment.

Globalization Process Expert (M/F) - Berlin

• Employer: euroscript Deutschland GmbH
• Location: Berlin, Germany
• Deadline: applications accepted until position is filled
• Website: http://www.euroscript.de
• Date posted: 22/12/2011
• Start date: ASAP

euroscript International is a leader in providing customers with global solutions in content lifecycle management. The euroscript divisions deliver comprehensive solutions that help customers design, build and run content management operations of all sizes. Thanks to its employees' expertise in the fields of language services, content and document management and system integration, euroscript is able to help businesses around the world to manage content more efficiently. With a market presence in over 17 countries, euroscript serves customers in a variety of business sectors including the public sector, aerospace, defence and transport, manufacturing, life sciences, financial services and energy and environment.

We are looking for experts in linguistic technology (including but not limited to, authoring sys-tems, workflow automation, and CAT tools) to join our global team. The position is based in Berlin, Germany. euroscript Deutschland GmbH is part of euroscript International S.A.

Your responsibilities:

• • Design and implementation of technology components for euroscript’s internal language services production;
  • Analysis of authoring, translation and terminology workflows and tools both within euroscript and as part of consultancy services for euroscript customers;
  • Evaluation and optimization of such workflows and creation of recommendations, designs, and consultancy offers for our customers;
  • Project Management for internal and external technology projects;
  • Permanent monitoring of on-going market, technological and scientific developments in the area of translation, authoring and process automation

Your profile:

Required:

• • MSc/degree or comparable university degree, preferably in computer science, computational linguistics, technical authoring, engineering or similar;
  • Broad understanding of tasks, tools and developments in the area of technical documentation, translation and natural language processing;
  • At least five years of professional experience as expert or consultant in the area of technical documentation and/or translation management;
  • Experience in IT project management and methodologies;
  • Good communication and presentation skills both in German and English;
  • Ability to write technical documents or offers in German and English;
  • Independent, open–minded and proactive;
  • Able to work harmoniously with colleagues in an international, multidisciplinary team, and with a multilingual user community

Preferred:

• • Programming experience;
  • Familiarity with further EU languages

Are you looking for a new challenge? Are you ready to join an international, dynamic and goal-oriented environment? If so, please send us your full application, indicating the reference GPE- -12/2011, to the following e-mail address: jobapplication@euroscript.de.

euroscript Deutschland GmbH Alt-Moabit 91 D-10559 Berlin jobapplication@euroscript.de www.euroscript.de

Front-End Developer for Speech Applications (Fluential Inc.)

• Title: Front-End Developer
• Location: Sunnyvale
• Status: Regular, Full-time, Exempt
• Deadline: Until filled
• Date Posted: 20 Dec 2011

Fluential is a well-funded, early-stage company that has developed a cutting-edge platform that uses natural language technologies to enable computers and smart phones to understand speech and either translate it to different language or perform other complex tasks. The company is now developing innovative commercial products that solve important, high-value problems in specific vertical industries including healthcare, construction, and travel.

Fluential offers excellent opportunities for employees to grow and share in our success. We offer competitive compensation, excellent benefits and a creative work environment.

Job Description

We are currently seeking talented software engineers to join our hands-on technical team to work on our next generation speech based technology. The ideal candidate will be capable of building usable, well-designed, and good-looking user interfaces using HTML, Javascript, or Ruby on Rails. The candidate should have a proven experience in anticipating customer needs. This position will work closely with a team of technology experts to define, develop, test, and deploy our target application.

Job Responsibilities

• Be a contributing member of a cross-functional scrum team in charge of delivering new features on a regular basis
• Interact with product owners and customers to understand the requirements before building a new feature.
• Interact with server side developers and architects to deliver vertical slices of functionality
• Participate with scrum team to plan and commit to each iteration of work.
• Drive towards delivery of those commitments throughout the iteration and raise risks early.
• Build quality user interfaces using best practices in design and usability.
• Participate in code reviews, test plan reviews, and doc reviews.
• Be open to learning new technologies and new problem domains.

Job Qualifications

• BS or MS in Computer Science or related field of study
• Minimum2-3 years development experience preferred
• Experience with Client-side HTML, Javascript
• Ruby on Rails, Python, PHP, Perl or Java is a plus
• Excellent communication and teamwork skills
• Passion for creating bleeding-edge technology
• Creative thinker and problem solver

Qualified candidates are encouraged to send a resume & cover letter to jobs@fluentialinc.com

Fluential is an Equal Opportunity Employer. To learn more, please visit us online at http://www.fluentialinc.com

Mobile Engineer for Speech Applications (Fluential Inc.)

• Title: Mobile App Engineer
• Location: Sunnyvale
• Status: Regular, Full-time, Exempt
• Deadline: Until filled
• Date Posted: 19 Dec 2011

Fluential, Inc. is a well-funded startup with a cutting-edge technology focused on speech recognition and machine translation. Our disruptive, capital-efficient, patent-pending platform is applicable to a variety of environments where multiple languages inhibit communication.

With an exciting, evolving product, Fluential, Inc. offers excellent opportunities for employees to grow and share in our success. We offer competitive compensation, excellent benefits and a creative work environment.

Job Description:

We are currently seeking talented software engineers to join our hands-on technical team to work on our next generation mobile apps. The mobile app engineer is instrumental in expanding our technology to the mobile platform, including design, implementation, testing, and support of the product on the mobile platform. This position will work closely with a team of technology experts to define, develop, test, and deploy software applications in the speech recognition and machine translation field.

Job Responsibilities:

• Participate in all phases of development from definition and design through implementation, debugging and testing
• Work closely with other developers in the team to find solutions for difficult problems
• Produce clear and complete functional and design specifications
• Provide expert and timely support for customer issues that reach the development team
• Participate in analyzing customer requirements and defining product specifications

Job Qualifications:

• BS or MS in Computer Science or related field of study
• 1-2 years development experience preferred
• Experience with App development on iOS or Android
• Strong knowledge of one or more: C#, Objective C, Javascript, Java
• Ability to quickly learn a complex existing code base with minimal instruction
• Excellent communication and teamwork skills
• Passion for technology, excellence and quality
• Creative thinker and problem solver

Qualified candidates are encouraged to send your resume and cover letter to jobs@fluentialinc.com.

Fluential, Inc. is an Equal Opportunity Employer. To learn more, please visit us online at http://www.fluentialinc.com

Researchers in NLG (Aberdeen University)

• Employer: University of Aberdeen
• Rank: Research assistant or fellow
• Speciality: Natural Language Generation
• Location: Aberdeen, UK
• Deadline: 28-Nov-2011
• Date Posted: 20-Dec-2011
• Contact email: c.mellish@abdn.ac.uk

dot.rural is a large multi-disciplinary project at Aberdeen University which is developing transformational IT technology to support rural communities. Within dot.rural, we are looking for researchers to work on applied NLG-related projects in health care, conservation and environment, and transport.

We are currently advertising for one post-doctoral research fellow and one pre-doctoral research assistant; it is likely that we will soon be advertising for a second post-doctoral research fellow. These are general positions within dot.rural, there is some flexibility about which specific projects each researcher works on. If you are interested in working for dot.rural, please contact Chris Mellish (c.mellish@abdn.ac.uk), who is in charge of NLG activities in dot.rural

For information, please see

• http://www.dotrural.ac.uk/ - dot.rural website
• http://www.dotrural.ac.uk/engage - page on "engaging with users", which includes links to most NLG-related projects in dot.rural
• http://www.abdn.ac.uk/ncs/computing/research/nlg/ - Aberdeen NLG group
• http://www.abdn.ac.uk/jobs/index.php - official announcements of vacancies

Computational linguist (Seattle)

• Employer: The Lingua Team
• Rank: Employee or contractor
• Speciality: Natural Language Processing
• Location: Seattle area, WA, USA (working at a client location)
• Deadline: 11/25/2011
• Date Posted: 11/13/2011
• Contact email: info@thelinguateam.com

The Lingua Team, a company based in the Seattle area, dedicated to specialized linguistic services is looking for a computational linguist with native or near native knowledge of one or more European languages. Please, email your resume for consideration. This is a 1-year contract, with potential to be extended long term.

Linguistic Solutions Architect (M/F)

• Employer: euroscript Luxembourg S.à r.l.
• Location: Bertrange, Luxembourg or Berlin, Germany
• Deadline: applications accepted until position is filled
• Website: http://www.euroscript.com
• Date posted: 31/10/2011
• Start date: ASAP

Your role:

As part of a global team, we are looking for experts in linguistic technology, including but not limited to, statistical machine translation (SMT), open source tools, and automation workflows.

Your responsibilities:

• • Design, implementation and maintenance of components for euroscript’s internal machine translation services;
  • Analysis of project workflows with respect to leverage of machine translation, definition of project-specific requirements on the machine translation service;
  • Evaluation and optimization of the performance of the machine translation service;
  • Permanent survey of on-going market, technological and scientific developments in the area of translation automation

Your profile:

Required:

• • MSc/Diploma in computational linguistics or computer science with good knowledge of machine translation (MT), as well as a broad overview of tasks, tools and developments in the area of natural language processing;
  • High familiarity with recent developments in SMT;
  • Ability to translate ideas from scientific research to practical application in a commercial environment;
  • At least three years of programming experience;
  • Ability to write technical documents and scientific papers in English;
  • Independent and open minded, with a strong sense of initiative;
  • Able to work harmoniously with other members within an international, multidisciplinary team, and with a multilingual user community;
  • Prior practical experience with statistical and/or grammar-based MT systems;
  • Good oral and written command of English is required

Preferred:

• • Practical experience with open source statistical machine translation systems (e.g. Moses);
  • Programming experience with Python;
  • Familiarity with further EU languages (preferably French, Dutch or German);
  • Experience in the translation environment and with CAT-Tools

Are you looking for a new challenge? Are you ready to join an international, dynamic and goal-oriented environment? If so, please send us your full application, indicating the reference LSA-10/2011 at the following email address: careers@euroscript.com

About us:

euroscript International is a leader in providing customers with global solutions in content lifecycle management. The euroscript divisions deliver comprehensive solutions that help customers design, build and run content management operations of all sizes. Thanks to its employees' expertise in the fields of language services, content and document management and system integration, euroscript is able to help businesses around the world to manage content more efficiently.

With a market presence in over 16 countries, euroscript serves customers in a variety of business sectors including the public sector, aerospace, defence and transport, manufacturing, life sciences, financial services and energy and environment. euroscript Luxembourg S.à.r.l. is part of euroscript International S.A.

Practical Natural Language Processing and Text Mining Professional

• • Employer: ComplaintLink
  • Specialty: Specialty: entity named extraction, text mining, machine learning algorithms
  • Location: H.O. in Toronto but you can work off-site anywhere in the world
  • Deadline: Applications accepted until the position is filled
  • Date Posted: October 14, 2011
  • Start Date: ASAP
  • Duration: contract position - 2 to 4 months

Position: Complaint Link Inc. is interested in hiring an off-site skilled NLP professional to work on a software project in the area of natural language processing, topic detection, and machine learning algorithms.

About the employer: ComplaintLink is a web start-up with a relatively simple user-interface and very complicated analytical software that will incorporate machine learning algorithms, natural language processing, sentiment analysis, entity named extraction, search algorithms and other data mining and business intelligence functionality. The website is structured much like a sophisticated forum with a social-networking component. The data being analyzed will be from user-generated textual discussions around a multitude of topics that will continuously be updated.

Description of project: The successful candidate will be working with other LAMP developers to bring an online business to fruition. The candidate will, using open source resources, intelligence and imagination, develop software that will function as the brains behind this online business.

The software being developed will access our site’s database and have the ability, without any manual keyword input for direction, to mine all textual data and present clearly which are the most 'important' or ‘passionate’ conversations and issues and be able to extract what those issues are and what related significant information is involved in those discussions. It will be able to identify and draw associations between significant pieces of information and present the information extracted in a way that provides a clear picture of the activity on the site in a practical and meaningful manner.

Degree and expertise: This project requires someone with a passion for machine learning algorithms and natural language processing. Ideally the candidate will be a postdoctoral fellow or at least someone as smart and experienced as one in the area of Natural Language Processing, machine learning algorithms, and data extraction and analysis. You must be able to work in a LAMP environment, be skilled with MySQL, be smart, reliable, and a self-starter with excellent problem solving and analytical abilities. You must have a solid grasp of English – written and verbal.

If you are interested in this opportunity please contact us at the following address: developers {at} ComplaintLink {dot} {com} Please include your CV and a short description of your past work and studies and interests.

Assistant Professor Position at Graduate School of Information Science, NAIST, Japan

• Employer: Graduate School of Information Science, Nara Institute of Science and Technology
• Rank or Title: Assistant Professor (5 years + 3 year extension)
• Specialty: Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Text Mining
• Location: Nara, Japan
• Deadline: 11th November, 2011
• Date Posted: 12th October, 2011
• Contact email: (for informal enquiries) matsu@is.naist.jp
• Website: http://www.naist.jp/en/about_naist/job_opportunities/academic_positions/20111006index.html

NLP: Two Research Scientist positions: 1) NLG and 2) Computational Semantics

• Employer: University of Colorado Boulder
• Rank or Title: Research Scientists
• Specialty: NLG, NLU, Computational Semantics, Spoken Dialogue Systems
• Location: Boulder, CO, USA
• Deadline: Until filled
• Date Posted: 11 October 2011
• Contact email: Rodney.Nielsen@Colorado.edu
• Website: http://www.RodneyNielsen.com

The Companionbots project in the Computational Language and Education Research Center, Institute of Cognitive Science, University of Colorado, Boulder, invites applications for two postdoctoral Research Scientist positions in Human-Robot Dialogue: one in Natural Language Generation (NLG) and the second in Computational Semantics / Natural Language Understanding.

Project Description

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CU Boulder is leading a large collaborative NSF-funded project, “Companionbots for Proactive Therapeutic Dialog on Depression”, to conduct research on a new class of dialog-based, home robotic healthcare assistants to facilitate in-home, real-time care. The research team integrates a broad spectrum of expertise including Clinical & Psychiatric Healthcare, Speech, Dialog, Natural Language Processing, Robotics, Computer Vision, Machine Learning, Human Factors and Cognitive Science. The immediate project will result in enabling technology for home healthcare Companionbots that integrates language, vision, and emotive technology to proactively recognize situations and dialog with isolated and elderly patients suffering from depression.

Object recognition and human activity recognition will augment natural language processing to provide current and historical context important to dynamic dialog. An emotive, physical avatar will provide an interaction mechanism with sufficient trust to extract meaningful information that may not be observable in the immediate environment. A central and unique aspect of the Companionbot’s dynamic dialog is the proactive generation of questions, which is driven by a user model including context, goals, health information, experiences, interests, and prior interactions. In addition to providing real-time intervention capabilities, the benefits of Companionbots include the continuous collection of physical and mental health data to improve doctor-patient interaction and enable data mining across patient cohort groups.

Natural Language Generation (NLG) Position

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The successful applicant will research and develop natural spoken dialogue generation components, with an emphasis on question generation, in the context of emotive, companion robots (Companionbots) communicating with isolated elderly suffering from depression. NLG will span multiple genres from casual conversation to goal-directed mental health education and training. It will also explore multiple techniques from more traditional Spoken Dialogue Systems (SDS) approaches to more recent text-to-text NLG methods. You will be encouraged to develop independent research ideas within the scope of the project, will play an active role in a variety of project areas, and will have the opportunity to apply your NLG expertise to a critical real-life problem in a multidisciplinary environment.

The Companionbots project includes numerous collaborators. Key to this position, Kathy McKeown, Columbia University, will consult on the Natural Language Generation components and co-advise this post-doc. You will also interact closely with the project’s clinical experts in understanding subjects and developing healthcare-related dialogue strategies, with users to help guide and evaluate research & development, and with project members involved in SDS, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), NLU, Vision, and the physical & visual expression of emotion. The project will involve significant bidirectional interaction between these constituents and their associated system components.

This position is available immediately and is initially for one year, with the possibility of an extension up to three years based on performance.

Qualifications

• A PhD or equivalent in computer science, computational linguistics, or a closely related discipline
• Rigorous experience and skills in NLG, preferably in conversational SDS, as evidenced by a publication record
• Solid skills in the application of Machine Learning to computational linguistics tasks, evidenced by publications
• Excellent software design and implementation skills
• Good verbal communication and English writing skills
• The ability to work both independently and in a multidisciplinary team

• It is a plus (but not a requirement) to have working knowledge or preferably a publication record indicating experience in usability, cognitive science, user modeling, or discourse analysis related to NLG and SDS

Computational Semantics Position

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The successful applicant will research and develop NLP components, with an emphasis on semantic interpretation of spoken dialogue in the context of emotive, companion robots (Companionbots) communicating with isolated elderly who are suffering from depression. NLP will be used to develop a deep understanding and representation of a situation based on past and immediate context. The semantics extracted will be used to construct a user model and predict future adverse events and situations. You will be encouraged to develop independent research ideas within the scope of the project, will play an active role in a variety of project areas, and will have the opportunity to apply your NLP expertise to a critical real-life problem in a multidisciplinary environment.

The Companionbots project includes numerous collaborators. You will interact closely with the project’s clinical experts in understanding subjects and relevant healthcare-related dialogue, with users to help guide and evaluate research & development, with Vision researchers to enhance contextual understanding, with Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) experts to improve ASR with semantic context, with a Natural Language Generation researcher to inform the spoken dialogue using deeper semantics, and with mechantronics researchers to ensure contextually appropriate emotive output. The project will involve significant bidirectional interaction between these constituents and their associated system components.

This position is available immediately and is initially for one year, with the possibility of extension based on performance.

Qualifications

• A PhD or equivalent in computer science, computational linguistics, or a closely related discipline
• Rigorous experience and skills in computational semantics, preferably in the context of conversational SDS, as evidenced by a strong publication record
• Solid skills in the application of Machine Learning to computational linguistics tasks, evidenced by publications
• Excellent software design and implementation skills
• Good verbal communication and English writing skills
• The ability to work both independently and in a multidisciplinary team

• It is a plus (but not a requirement) to have working knowledge or preferably a publication record indicating experience in user modeling, discourse analysis, and cognitive science related to SDS

The Center for Computational Language and Education Research (CLEAR)

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You will be part of the Institute of Cognitive Science’s Center for Computational Language and Education Research (CLEAR), which includes prominent senior human language technology faculty Drs. James Martin (co-author of Speech and Language Processing), Martha Palmer (PropBank, VerbNet, …), Wayne Ward (an ASR and SDS pioneer, who will lead the speech aspects of Companionbots), and others. Including students, CLEAR consists of about 40 researchers with backgrounds in computer science, linguistics, machine learning, cognitive science, psychology, education and human computer interaction. The group’s research investigates a variety of topics and applications, but emphasizes the application of human language technologies to educational and medical applications. CLEAR is housed at the Center for Innovation and Creativity along side numerous researchers in allied fields including psycholinguistics, cognitive neuroscience, reading, and cognitive disability research. All of these factors make CU Boulder one of the leading institutions for research in computational semantics.

Boulder, Colorado

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Boulder, just 25 miles from Denver, is a mid-sized community of 300,000 residents nestled along the Flatirons, at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. Boulder’s citizens report the highest quality of life ratings in the United States among mid-sized cities, perhaps because of its balance of intellectual and outdoor recreational capital. Apart from the University of Colorado at Boulder, Colorado’s flagship university, Boulder is home to three major scientific National Institutes and numerous high-tech companies.

Boulder boasts outstanding outdoor recreational opportunities. It was rated the "#1 Sports Town in America" by Outside Magazine. Boulder residents enjoy over 300 sunny days per year and immediate access to climbing, hiking, kayaking, and fishing within walking distance of the city center. World-class outdoor recreation is available in the 30,000 acres of open space parks surrounding Boulder, Rocky Mountain National Park (just 40 miles away), and 8 outstanding ski resorts (within 20-100 miles).

In addition to its scientific and scholarly strengths, Boulder possesses a unique blend of cultural interests. Because of its desirability as a place to live, Boulder is also home to a high concentration of novelists, Olympic and other elite athletes. These groups together support over 300 restaurants, more than 30 art galleries, 4 local museums, 32 movie and stage theaters, and many festivals, including the Colorado Shakespeare Festival and the Colorado Music Festival.

Application

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Please email questions about these positions to the Companionbot’s Principal Investigator:

Rodney.Nielsen@colorado.edu

Rodney Nielsen, Ph.D. Research Scientist Computational Language and Education Research Center Institute of Cognitive Science University of Colorado, Boulder

To apply follow the instructions at the Jobs at CU link below to submit your CV (with details regarding research experience), a statement of research interests, links to your most relevant papers, and a list of at least 3 references with email addresses.

Natural Language Generation: http://www.jobsatcu.com/applicants/Central?quickFind=66322

Natural Language Understanding: http://www.jobsatcu.com/applicants/Central?quickFind=66325

The University of Colorado is an Equal Opportunity Employer committed to building a diverse workforce. We encourage applications from women, racial and ethnic minorities, individuals with disabilities and veterans. Alternative formats of this ad can be provided upon request for individuals with disabilities by contacting the ADA Coordinator at (303) 492-1334.

The University of Colorado at Boulder conducts background checks on all final applicants being considered for employment.