LINGUIST List 11.1277

Wed Jun 7 2000

Jobs: General/Comp Linguist, University of Pittsburgh

Editor for this issue: Naomi Ogasawara <naomilinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Pamela Jordan, General/Comp Linguist at University of Pittsburgh, USA

The Why2000 project seeks a full-time linguist to participate in the
design, implementation and evaluation of an advanced natural-language
based tutoring system for qualitative physics problem solving. The
primary duty of the linguist is to annotate a corpus of student
answers to qualitative problems and the dialogues that follow between
the student and tutor as the tutor attempts to correct misconceptions
evident in the student's answer. Additional responsibilities for this
position include assisting in developing the annotation scheme,
building semantic representations of the underlying physics concepts,
writing meaning representations for student answers and follow-up
dialogues, and analyzing the dialogue structure.

The qualifications for this position are at least a B.A. in
Linguistics or a B.S. in Computational Linguistics and experience with
corpus annotation and analysis in support of computational linguistics
research and development. Another plus would be experience in
programming computers. Athough this position does not involve
programming, the linguist will have to work closely with computational
linguists and programmers in devising an appropriate annotation scheme
and authoring supporting knowledge, so familiarity with implementation
issues would be an asset. In addition, although the position does not
require prior expertise in physics, the linguist should not be
intimidated by the need to understand dialogues discussing elementary
physics principles and should be willing to learn about the physics
concepts involved.

The Why2000 group is a research group composed of artificial
intelligence researchers, computational linguists and psychologists.
It is led by Kurt VanLehn at the University of Pittsburgh
(http://www.pitt.edu/~vanlehn) and Art Graesser at the University of
Memphis (http://mnemosyne.csl.psyc.memphis.edu/home/graesser/). The
research is funded by a 3 year contract from the Office of Naval
research that begins May 1, 2000. The Why2000 group is part of
CIRCLE, an NSF-funded research center that studies human and computer
tutoring (see http://www.pitt.edu/~circle).

This position is located at the University of Pittsburgh in the
Learning Research and Development Center. It is a full-time research
staff position with full benefits. Salary will be commensurate with
experience. Send inquiries and CVs or resumes to Pamela Jordan
(pjordanpitt.edu).