February 7, 2006

Position: Postdoc fellowship at the Gaspard-Monge Institute

Funding: the CNRS postdoctoral fellowship program

Title: Processing bitexts with lemmatised concordancers

Location: Computational Linguistic team of the Gaspard-Monge Institute (IGM), University of Marne-la-Vallée and CNRS (UMR 8049), France

Deadline: as soon as possible and not later June 30

CNRS official announcement

Description:

We invite applications for a postdoctoral position at IGM, funded by CNRS. The appointment will be for one year (non renewable), starting on September 1, 2006. The 12 month fellowship package includes approx. 2150 euro monthly salary (before tax), health insurance and travel grant. The aim of the project is to combine two technologies: bitext processing (a bitext is a pair of texts one of which is a translation of the other) and lemmatised concordancing (a concordancer is a piece of software that locates occurrences of a pattern with inflected forms, and that lists occurrences in context). Bitext processing gained maturity as regards sentence alignment (good algorithms are implemented in open-source software; there is an international standard for the format of aligned bitext), but word alignment is still an open problem. Lemmatised concordancers are one of the best-known products of IGM, but they are limited to a monolingual operation as yet. Combining both technologies will allow users to explore a text in a language through its translation into another. There are various applications (search engines, technical translation, extraction of bilingual lexicons, computer aids for literary translation and language learning...). The research programme is to implement the tools required to generate bilingual lemmatised concordances and to assess their potential for applications. The software produced will be made available under LGPL license.

General requirements:

Applicants must

- have a Ph.D. or equivalent degree at the time of employment;

- not have worked previously in the lab applied for. The only exception to this rule is for someone returning to the lab after a period of absence of at least one year;

- be less than 40 years of age.

There are no nationality restrictions.

Specific qualifications:

Ph.D. in Computer Science or Computational Linguistics. A strong knowledge of state of the art in bitext processing (which is basically statistic-based) and also of lemmatised concordancing (which is mainly based on lexical resources) is desirable. The candidate must have prior experience of hybrid systems.

How to apply:

Applications should include application form, CV, list of publications, a one-page description of research interests, and the names and addresses of two referees. They should be sent to candidatures-igm@univ-mlv.fr.

Contact:

Eric Laporte, IGM, http://www-igm.univ-mlv.fr/~laporte/index_en.html

Phone: 33 - 1 6095 7552

Fax: 33 - 1 6095 7755