8 September: fyi -- post-doc, NL
Index of September 2004 | Index of year: 2004 | Full index
*TILBURG UNIVERSITY*
Tilburg University in Tilburg, The Netherlands, is a specialised
institute of learning and research, with an emphasis on social
sciences and the humanities. It employs more than 1,600 staff and
has a student body of around 10,000. There are 19 colleges and
research centers, which provide graduate and postgraduate tuition
and research of outstanding quality.
*FACULTY OF ARTS*
In its education and research programme, the Faculty of Arts
addresses socially relevant domains in the fields of language,
communication, information and literary culture. Important areas
of interest are business communication and digital media, discourse
studies, language technology and artificial intelligence,
multilingualism in a multicultural society, and culture and
literature. The Faculty of Arts has an excellent record in
evaluations of its research and education.
The Computational Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence research
group in the Faculty of Arts has a position available for a:
RESEARCHER AT POSTDOC LEVEL
(3 years) in the project:
"Parallel Agent-based Dialogue Management Engine (PARADIME)"
(m/f, 38 hours a week, vacancy number 810.04.11)
Application deadline: 25 September 2004
*PROJECT INFORMATION*
The Parallel Agent-based Dialogue Management Engine (PARADIME)
project aims at the development and implementation of a formal
framework for dialogue management in multimodal human-computer
dialogue, based on theoretical and experimental studies of
human-human and human-computer dialogue. The Dialogue Management
system that the project will deliver should, in particular,
incorporate general principles of cooperative, rational, and
social communicative behaviour which are assumed to underlie
human communication.
The PARADIME dialogue manager is conceived as consisting of a set
of autonomous software agents that apply the principles of
cooperativity, rationality and sociality to the use of dialogue
acts, where different types of dialogue acts are defined as
operations that change the information states of the dialogue
participants. The PARADIME project builds on previous theoretical,
experimental and computational dialogue studies in the
participating research groups at the universities of Tilburg and
Eindhoven, such as in the projects DENK, PLUS, and MATIS, and on
the theoretical framework known as Dynamic Interpretation Theory.
PARADIME is a highly ambitious project that aims to both further
the state of the art in dialogue theory and build an operational
dialogue systems that is theoretically and experimentally well
founded.
Funding for this research has been made available by the Dutch
Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO), as part of their new
IMIX (Interactive Multi-modal Information eXtraction) Programme.
The project, in which Tilburg University and Eindhoven University
of Technology work together, will be embedded in the Computational
Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence Research Group at Tilburg
University. Project supervisors are prof. dr. Harry Bunt (Tilburg)
and dr. Jacques Terken (Eindhoven).
Being part of the IMIX programme, the PARADIME dialogue manager is
required to be able to be integrated into the IMIX demonstrator
system that will be developed jointly by all research groups
participating in the IMIX project (involving groups from the
universities of Nijmegen, Groningen, Amsterdam, Twente, Eindhoven
and Tilburg). The PARADIME work will be carried out in close
collaboration with the other IMIX projects,in particular with the
two other IMIX projects already started at Tilburg University,
concerned with question answering and output presentation.
*MAIN TASKS*
The researcher's work will focus on applying - and further developing -
the theoretical framework adopted in the project to the multimodal
dialogue functionality which is to be demonstrated by the IMIX
system and to be defined jointly by all the IMIX participants.
The further development of the framework will be supported by
dialogue experiments and the analysis of experimental dialogue data.
The implementation work will consist of developing the agent-based
software for generating dialogue acts according to the adopted
principles of cooperativity, rationality and sociality, and the
related software for dynamic context modelling.
*PROFILE*
Applicants should have a Ph.D. degree in computational linguistics,
cognitive science, or computer science, with a background in NLP in
general and in dialogue systems and theories and NLP in particular.
Applicants should have programming experience (C/C++/Perl/Java).
Applicants should have, or be willing to develop, active knowledge
of spoken and written Dutch, which is the target language within the
IMIX projects.
*TERMS OF EMPLOYMENT*
The collective labour agreement of Tilburg University applies.
The selected candidate will get a full time three year contract.
The position has a salary that depends on experience, with a minimum
gross monthly salary of EUR 2.179 and a maximum of EUR 3.453.
*MORE INFORMATION*
For more information contact Harry Bunt via email
(harry.bunt@uvt.nl) or telephone (+31.13.4663060),
or Jacques Terken via email
(j.m.b.terken@tue.nl) or telephone (+31.40.247254).
*APPLICATIONS*
Applications should include cover letter, CV, and names of two
references, and should be sent before the application deadline of
September 25, 2004 by regular mail to
Mrs. O. Zweekhorst
Managing Director, Faculty of Arts, Room U 40
Tilburg University
P.O. Box 90153
NL-5000 LE Tilburg
The Netherlands
or by email to solliciterenFDL@uvt.nl . In your letter, make
reference to vacancy code 810.04.11.
It is the policy of the university to increase the number of women
employed. Also members of ethnic minority groups and handicapped
people are expressly invited to apply.
Index of September 2004 | Index of year: 2004 | Full index