4 LECTURESHIPS IN NATURAL LANGUAGE ENGINEERING AT DURHAM UNIVERSITY
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The Department of Computer Science at Durham University is looking to recruit 4
new lecturers in the field of Natural Language Engineering. The 4 lecturers
will join the Laboratory for Natural Language Engineering, one of the foremost
centres in this subject, and actively collaborate on the LOLITA (Large-scale,
Object-based, Linguistic Interactor, Translator and Analyser) project.
We expect to recruit 2 experienced lecturers on the B scale, and 2 junior ones
on the A scale.
The experienced lecturers will have an excellent research track-record in the
field, with substantial publications, a good PhD supervision success rate and a
healthy fund-raising portfolio.
The junior lecturers will be researchers of clear potential and dedication.
All the lecturers must have a PhD in Computer Science or related areas, be very
highly motivated, ready to work in a tightly knit group on a long term project,
and able to teach at the required 'excellent' level. They would be expected to
take up their posts as soon as possible, but not later than October 1995.
We are looking in particular for the following areas of NLE: planning
(discourse and dialogue), learning (grammatical and semantical rules, new
concepts, optimisations), applications (large scale systems, front-end,
user-defined modes), knowledge representation and elicitation (concept mapping
across languages and domains, supervised and automatic analysis of corpora,
encyclopedic knowledge); however, specialists in other areas of NLE are very
welcome to apply.
The LNLE is a thriving group of 22 researchers (reader, lecturers, RA's and
postgrads). Our central piece of work is the LOLITA system (see below for
details). The LNLE is part of the Department of Computer Science, a rapidly
expanding and very successful department, whose other main wing is the
internationally renown Centre for Software Maintenance. At the last Research
Assessment exercise we have been awarded a grade 4. We have excellent computing
facilities, and we are soon to move into a substantial newly-refurbished
location.
Formal advertisments will shortly appear in the Guardian and the Times HES.
Informal enquiries may be addressed to:
Dr. Roberto Garigliano,
Laboratory for Natural Language Engineering,
Computer Science Department,
University of Durham, South Road, Durham, DH1 3LE.
tel: (091) 374 2639 fax: (091) 374 2560
e_mail: Roberto.Garigliano@durham.ac.uk
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THE LOLITA PROJECT
Here are a few facts about LOLITA:
- based on a conceptual graph of more than 100k nodes, compatible with WordNet;
- able to perform the fundamental morphological, grammatical, semantical,
pragmatical, discourse analysis and generation functions;
- under development for more than 8 years, at present a team of more than 20
researchers working on it;
- mainly written in Haskell, a pure lazy functional language, with high order
functions, polymorphic types and type classes (more than 45k lines of code,
corresponding to approx 450k lines in an imperative language);
- can handle analysis of real text samples; prototype applications include
query, dialogue, template extraction, translation and language tutoring;
- advanced inference capabilities, including multiple inheritance, relevant
implication, epistemic reasoning and plausible reasoning (analogy, closed
personal world assumption and plausible epistemic);
- processes English and Chinese; Italian and Spanish under development;
- very fast execution times (a parallel version under development);
- applications with Siemens Plessey, Rolls-Royce and other major companies and
governmental organisations;
- chosen by the Royal Society for its prestigious 1993 Soiree Exhibition;
- registered for the 1995 MUC-6 competition (sponsored by ARPA, the Advanced
Research Projects Agency of the USA).
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