15 December: fyi -- dialogue research, UK
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*** Post-Doctoral Research Associate ***
Natural Language Generation group
(http://mcs.open.ac.uk/nlg/)
Centre for Research in Computing
(http://crc.open.ac.uk)
The Open University, UK
"CODA - COherent Dialogue Automatically generated from text"
Position based in Milton Keynes, UK
(40 minutes from central London by train)
Duration: 2 years (Full-time)
Expected start date: March 1, 2009
*** Project Overview:
The Department of Computing at The Open University
(OU) has recently been awarded research funds by
the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research
Council (EPSRC) to develop the theory and technology
for automatic transformation of text in monologue form
to information-delivering dialogue, specifically dialogue
between a 'layman' (e.g., patient or student) and
an 'expert' (e.g., doctor or tutor).
The project will include construction of a parallel
corpus of monologues and dialogues that express the
same information. The corpus will be employed to develop
and implement a system for mapping spans of text in
monologue form to dialogue. For example, a text
describing when and how to take a medicine may be
transformed into the text of a dialogue between a patient
and pharmacist. The aim is for the text in dialogue form to
present the same information as the original text, but in a
more memorable and engaging way.
In collaboration with the visiting researcher to the project,
Dr. Prendinger of the National Institute of Informatics
in Tokyo, the project will also investigate how the proposed
technology for mapping monologue to dialogue can be
interfaced with state-of-the-art multimedia information
presentation systems (involving computer-animated characters
and speech synthesis). The project will build on the
pilot study described in Piwek et al. (2007).
Piwek, P., H. Hernault, H. Prendinger and M. Ishizuka (2007).
Generating Dialogues between Virtual Agents Automatically
from Text. In: Intelligent Virtual Agents: Proceedings
of IVA07, LNAI 4722, pages 161-174. Springer Verlag.
*** A Research Position will be available on the project for:
a candidate with a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science (or
related area)/equivalent experience, and good programming
skills (preferably in Java).
Interest in all of the following areas and knowledge in at least
one of the areas is desirable:
- Paraphrasing/Text-to-Text generation/
Machine Translation
- Natural Language Generation
- Dialogue Modelling
- Corpus linguistics
£24,152 - £28,839 according to experience & qualifications.
Closing date for applications: 31 January 2009.
Interviews are expected to be in February.
We welcome informal enquiries. Please contact Paul Piwek
for further details and information
on the formal application process.
Dr. Paul Piwek
Lecturer in the Computing Department
Centre for Research in Computing
The Open University
Walton Hall, Milton Keynes, UK
Web: http://mcs.open.ac.uk/pp2464
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