[Corpora-List] Postdoc Position in Question Answering

From: Maarten de Rijke (mdr@science.uva.nl)
Date: Mon Oct 13 2003 - 16:57:23 MET DST

  • Next message: Van Vu Dinh: "[Corpora-List] In seeking for a common English vocabulary database"

    Postdoc Position in Question Answering in Amsterdam

    The Language & Inference Technology Group (http://lit.science.uva.nl/)
    at the University of Amsterdam seeks a versatile, energetic, and
    highly motivated postdoc to work on inference for question answering.
    Our group has cutting-edge projects on information retrieval, natural
    language processing, question answering, and computational logic.
    Our team consists of about 20 faculty, postdoctoral researchers, and
    graduate students, all with a strong international and
    multi-disciplinary
    orientation.

    * Project description

    Temporal information is often a significant part of the meaning
    communicated in texts. To know that something happened may be of
    little value if we do not know when it happened, or what happened
    before, since, or at the time. Building on the recently released
    TimeML annotation standard, the project will lay the groundwork
    for temporal question answering systems by focusing on the central
    role of inference in question analysis, candidate answer mining,
    and answer generation. The project aims to exploit
    constraint-based reasoning, and in particular, model generation,
    for temporal question answering.

    There is a strong focus on experimental evaluations of the main
    components of the envisaged architecture, especially with respect
    to the overall temporal question answering task.

    * Requirements

    The candidate should hold a PhD-degree in a relevant area, and
    have a strong background in one or more of the following:

    - Question answering, esp. statistical and corpus-based QA

    - Computational semantics, esp. of time, tense, aspect, actions
       and events

    - Inference, esp. automated reasoning and constraint programming.

    Strong programming skills (Perl, Java, C++) are a requirement.
    Industrial experience, or a track-record of project-based
    experimental work, is a definite advantage.

    * Environment

    We offer an extremely friendly working environment, excellent
    computational facilities, a high level of interaction across
    academic disciplines, and a location minutes from Amsterdam city
    center, with easy access to other cities in the Netherlands and
    Europe. The three-year project includes a budget for
    gold-standard or evaluation experiments, builds on the home-grown
    Quartz system, is supported by a part-time programmer (50\%), and
    has a generous equipment and travel budget.

    * Contact details/Further information

    Visit http://www.science.uva.nl/~mdr/Projects/ITEQA/ for an
    on-line version of the project proposal. Informal inquiries are
    welcome and should be sent to Maarten de Rijke
    (mdr@science.uva.nl) or Jaap Kamps (kamps@science.uva.nl).

    To apply, send a full CV (including list of publications and a
    description of your research interests), together with a cover
    letter and names and contact details of at least two referees to
    Maarten de Rijke.

    --
    Language & Inference Technology Group  *  http://lit.science.uva.nl
    ILLC * U. Amsterdam * Nieuwe Achtergracht 166 * 1018 WV Amsterdam
    The Netherlands  * Ph: +31 20 525 5358/2582  * Fax: +31 20 525 2800
    



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Mon Oct 13 2003 - 16:55:42 MET DST