PHP_APE/RSS/1.1.20100311 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss 1440 Applications are invited for a postdoctoral research position in the field of machine translation (MT), in the context of the COMTIS project funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation. COMTIS aims at improving the accuracy of MT systems by modeling dependencies across sentences (e.g. cohesion markers such as pronouns, referring expressions, or tense / mode / aspect) and integrating these models into statistical MT systems. The postdoctoral position will focus on the evaluation of the improvement in translation achieved by the use of these techniques within the COMTIS MT engine. The successful candidate will define new evaluation metrics and evaluation resources (in collaboration with partners at the University of Geneva), and will coordinate their application to state-of-the-art systems as well as to the systems resulting from the project. The new methods should include, metrics, test suites, and automatic procedures, and should be integrated in a larger framework of metrics for MT evaluation. Contribution to system integration, preparation and fine-tuning for evaluation is also expected.

]]> Thu, 19 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0200 Tue, 10 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0200 Tue, 10 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0200 Tue, 20 Jul 2010 00:00:00 +0200 Thu, 24 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0200 Mon, 14 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0200 The objective of the proposed PhD work is to study new approaches to question answering (QA) systems in the context of support tools for group discussions. The emphasis will be on interactive QA, in which human users are able to formulate a request for information to a QA system and subsequently refine or refocus the answers, by engaging in spoken dialogue with the QA system. Moreover, the proposed work should target a context-aware QA system, which is used while humans perform other activities, such as a group discussion. Therefore, the multimodal context of the respective human-human and human-computer interactions must be taken into account, for instance by distinguishing queries addressed to the QA system from other utterances, and by adapting the dialogue strategy of the system to the state of the human-human discussion sensed by the system. The long-term goal is to provide just-in-time question answering with minimal intervention from the human user, following an approach that is similar to just-in-time information retrieval tools developed at Idiap.

]]> Wed, 09 Jun 2010 00:00:00 +0200 Tue, 20 Apr 2010 00:00:00 +0200 Mon, 01 Feb 2010 00:00:00 +0100 The Idiap Research Institute is currently seeking talented senior researchers with a proven record of high level research and project management, and whose interests are aligned with our existing strengths in speech processing, computer vision, biometric authentication, multimodal processing, and machine learning. More precisely, applicants with strong background and interest in statistical sequence processing (e.g., applied to speech and multimodal processing) are strongly invited to apply. Candidates with these strengths will be expected to play a leading role in the research, teaching and strategic development of the Institute. Academic careers can also be considered through our affiliation with the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Lausanne (EPFL). Most of Idiap's research activities take place in the framework of National long term research initiatives such as the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) on “Interactive Multimodal Information Management” (IM2) or large European projects.

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