LINGUIST List 10.1456

Tue Oct 5 1999

Jobs: Semantics, French Computational Linguist

Editor for this issue: Jody Huellmantel <jodylinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Patrick Manalastas, Semantics - UCLA Linguistics Department
2. Bradley Music, French computational linguist at Microsoft

The UCLA Linguistics Department has been authorized to recruit for a
tenure track Assistant Professor position in Semantics starting Fall
2000. A secondary expertise in a cognitive science area such as
computational linguistics or psycholinguistics is desirable but not a
prerequisite. The PhD must be completed by the time of the
appointment. Applicants should submit an application letter, CV, and
sample research papers. Three letters of recommendation should be
sent. The application and letters should be addressed to:

Semantics Search Committee 
Department of Linguistics, UCLA 
Box 951543 
Los Angeles, CA 90025-1543

The application deadline is December 15, 1999. We anticipate
conducting interviews at the January 2000 LSA meeting. 
UCLA is an equal opportunity employer.

French Computational Linguist

Natural Language technology is being advanced at Microsoft in a number
of exciting projects. Our approach makes heavy use of real-world
texts from which we are able to extract a rich knowledge base for
development and testing, which can then be used to bootstrap into
increasingly more advanced stages of machine understanding. We are
empirically oriented, and do not follow any of the currently received
linguistic theories in detail, flexibly integrating good linguistic
ideas wherever feasible.

The French computational linguist will join our team within the
Natural Language Group working on enhancing & extending a
computational grammar & text critiquing (grammar checking) system for
French, in accordance with the overall architecture of the Microsoft
Natural Language Understanding system. Initial emphasis is on
understanding the component for the text critiquing system, followed
by the component for syntactic analysis. S/he will also be testing the
syntactic analysis & text critiques.

The technology developed in this team will ship in the next version of
Microsoft Office, and will be used by millions of people! Customer
focus and concern for the user experience are top priorities.

Qualifications should include experience in linguistic research and
software development, a product focus, familiarity with natural
language processing, a flexible approach to linguistic theory, and an
advanced degree in linguistics, computer science or a related
discipline. Native proficiency in French is required; practical
experience with NLP implementation issues is highly desired.

To apply for this position, please submit your CV/resume online to
NLJOBSmicrosoft.com <mailto:NLJOBSmicrosoft.com> . For faster
processing, reference code brm0001.


(A reasonable first-version summary of our techniques and some of our
experience can be found in the book Natural Language Processing: The
PLNLP Approach, edited by Karen Jensen, George E. Heidorn, and Stephen
D. Richardson, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston, 1993. A full list
of publications by the Natural Language Processing group is also
available. See also the Microsoft Research website at
http://research.microsoft.com/ .)