7 January: fyi -- research, Germany

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Research Position in NL and Ontology Design/Engineering

A new transregional collaborative research center (startdate:
1st. January 2003) has just been established at the Universities of
Bremen and Freiburg, Germany. The research center is particularly
concerned with spatial reasoning, representation and action. Within
this research center we currently have one position available at the
University of Bremen in the area of ONTOLOGICAL ENGINEERING and
NATURAL LANGUAGE PROCESSING. We are looking to fill this position as
soon as possible.

The research center will be constructing extensive sets of spatial
representations and will involve the design of definitive sets of
spatial ontologies for the areas addressed. In addition, natural
language input and output (dialogic) will be supported for
communication between artificial agents and human users concerning
spatially situated tasks. Here the applicant should either be familiar
with, or be interested in becoming familiar with, all current relevant
ontology construction efforts, including: SUO, DOLCE, Cyc, etc., as
well as their representations (KIF, CycL, CL, OWL, etc.) To support the
natural language processing, linguistically motivated ontologies --
particularly grammatically-motivated ontologies such as that of the
Penman Upper Model and Generalized Upper Model
(http://www.purl.org/net/gum2) -- will be developed further and
employed.

A significant part of the work involved for the position will be the
further development of the spatial and linguistic ontologies and the
design and implementation of flexible mappings between them. The
mappings necessary will be derived partly on the basis of empirical
dialog experiments involving robotic spatial assistance devices and
naive human users. These experiments will be conducted by a further
researcher on the team.

The position is available until 31 Dec 2006 (extension possible) and
has a salary range from approx. 34,000 to 45,000 Euro p.a. An
excellent background in ontology design and/or computational
linguistics and/or knowledge representation is expected. The position
is suitable both for a doctoral project or a post-doctorate research
position depending on background and expertise of the applicant.

For more information about this and other positions within the
research center, see:
http://www.cosy.informatik.uni-bremen.de/sfb/positions/

For more information about the research center, see:
http://www.cosy.informatik.uni-bremen.de/sfb/

For my current ontology website, see:
http://www.fb10.uni-bremen.de/anglistik/langpro/webspace/jb/info-pages/ontology/
ontology-root.htm

Feel free to contact me for any further info,
John Bateman

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