LINGUIST List 11.2194

Wed Oct 11 2000

Jobs: WWW Summarisation at Hanover Medical School

Editor for this issue: Michael Appleby <michaellinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. Brigitte Endres-Niggemeyer, WWW Summarisation/Comp Ling: Researcher at Hanover Medical School, Germany

Rank of Job: researcher
Areas Required: WWW Summarization in Bone Marrow Transplantation
Other Desired Areas: Medical Informatics, AI, NLP, web technologies,
knowledge representation
University or Organization: Hanover Medical School
Department: Hematology and Oncology
State or Province: Lower Saxony
Country: Germany
Final Date of Application: asap - Oct. 31 at latest
Contact: Brigitte Endres-Niggemeyer
Brigitte.Endres-Niggemeyerik.fh-hannover.de

Address for Applications:
Ricklinger Stadtweg 120
Hannover
Lower Saxony 30459
Germany

Applications are invited for a research position: WWW Summarizing in
Bone Marrow Transplantation (BMT) 

Your Task
Your core task is the integration of a cognitively founded WWW
summarization system, using some ready-made components and developing
other subsystems from scratch. The job has also empirical perspectives
in formative evaluation. Student research assistants will help you.

Your Qualifications
We expect a solid education in computer science or medical informatics. It may be combined as major or minor with an appropriate other
discipline. A PhD is fine, but not strictly necessary. You will need
WWW technologies, programming skills and your background in AI and/or
computational linguistics. If you are interested in medicine and
hospital information systems - all the better. 

Working Conditions and Contract
You will join a distributed interdisciplinary team at the University of
the Applied Sciences and the Medical School of Hanover in Northern
Germany. Your physical working place will be at the Medical School.
English is acceptable as a working language. 
We want to hire a qualified and motivated colleague as soon as possible.
The salary follows the normal BAT IIa rate for researchers in German
public service. It is sensitive to age, marital status and number of
children. The contract covers two years. Since the project is supported
by the German Science Foundation (DFG), some specific DFG conditions
apply. We intend to pursue the approach till application.

Some Essentials of System Development
We are beginning a cognitively founded WWW summarization system for Bone
Marrow Transplantation (BMT), a highly specialized field of internal
medicine: 
- The system language is English, with some limited German search
facilities.
- Summarization is supported by an ontology of the domain. We develop it
empirically, starting with a corpus of recent BMT papers, then testing
and expanding the ontology in its application environment. 
- Cognitively founded agents perform the core summarization tasks. They
cooperate in a blackboard model. Most of them are known from earlier
research, but not yet fit for real-world application. Domain-specific
agents must be added.
- Third party components - parser, RST analysis - are integrated. We
search the WWW and Medline, we exploit UMLS, WordNet and other
resources.
- The target system will run on a Mac and Sun platform. WWW access
starts with Mac OS tools. Our own summarization agents will be
programmed in LISP. 
- We adhere to the principles of user-centered system design. 

You find additional information at
http://www.ik.fh-hannover.de/ik/person/ben/ben.htm

Please send e-mail inquiries and applications (with CV and list of
publications) to 

Brigitte.Endres-Niggemeyerik.fh-hannover.de