5 December: fyi -- undergraduate or postgraduate internship, Dublin

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Microsoft European Product Development Centre
Information Worker Division

A Requirement exists for a current degree or post-grad student to secure an
internship within Microsoft Ireland in Dublin.

Role: Computational Linguist
Start: July 2009
Duration: 12 Months
Ref: TEC05

Summary

Would you like the opportunity to contribute to Microsoft language
technology development? Are you interested in machine translation,
controlled language, computational lexicography and morphology or
contextual spelling correction? If so we'd like you to join our Ireland
teams working on Microsoft word-leading proofing tools, machine translation
solutions, and more.

The Language Technology Team is a member of Information Worker division of
Microsoft responsible for providing proofing tools to several Microsoft
applications including the 2007 Microsoft® Office system. They source,
license, test and release over 70 different languages, everything from
established European languages such as French and Spanish to minority
languages such as Maori and Zulu!

This team is looking for interns that will help develop and test linguistic
quality metrics and evaluation tools for spellers, grammars, thesauri and
autocorrect lists and potentially also on controlled language and
translation memory solutions and machine translation systems. The
successful candidate will also help test the quality of new spellers for
the Local Language Program which promotes minority languages through
technology. If you have a passion for language and technology, this is an
ideal opportunity to gain experience in the world of computational
linguistics.

We also have a position available focused on language technology
integration in the translation process. Here we look at integrating
recycling and translation memory with machine translation and post-editing.

Responsibilities:

- Understand internal linguistic metrics methodologies for all Proofing
Tools (Speller, Thesaurus, Hyphenator, Grammar, Autocorrect lists,
Wordbreakers and Stemmers).
- Define linguistic quality bars; developing linguistic quality strategy,
and/or metrics for all languages of Proofing Tools that can easily be used
to verify the linguistic quality of the Proofing Tools.
- Work on development of linguistic test tools
- Ancillary functional testing of proofing tools may be required
- Work alongside linguistic vendors and team in US to determine the
quality of the Proofing Tools
- Help to ship Proofing Tools in over 70 languages for next version of Office
- Work on Machine translation, translation memory and controlled language
integration, validation and testing.

Requirements:

- Current student of linguistics or computer science with an interest in
natural language processing or computational linguistics
- Good communication skills are a must, both written and verbal
- Some knowledge of any of the following languages, either C#, Java,
Visual Basic.Net or C++ would be advantageous
- Fluency of a foreign language would be advantageous but not essential

Competencies:

- Passion for Technology
- Drive for results
- Interpersonal Awareness
- Passion for problem solving
- Ability to deal with ambiguity

If you are interested in learning more about this job, please contact
colinla@microsoft.com or dags@microsoft.com to learn more about this
exciting job opportunity by finding out in more detail what the job entails
and the team that you would be working in.


Application Deadline: 31-Jan-2009 (Open until filled)

Email Address for Applications: colinla@microsoft.com
Contact Information:
Colin Laird
Email: colinla@microsoft.com

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