Vacancy: PhD position

The Department of Computer Science (LIA) of the Université d'Avignon,
southern France, is looking for a PhD student to work in the area of
Statistical Machine Translation.

LIA has performed research in many fields of Natural Language
Processing for more than 20 years. It has in particular a strong
experience in spoken language systems.


Topic: Speech statistical machine translation

Last years' most efficient Machine Translation (MT) systems are based
on statistical methods. To increase their capacities, these approaches
require large database with examples, which may be hard in some cases,
for some specialized domains for instance. Besides, MT systems have to
deal with transcription errors when they are applied on hypotheses
generated by speech recognition systems. A relevant research prospect
is to use information of different types when applying MT.

The use of syntax has recently allowed recent breakthroughs in MT,
either using parsing trees or hierarchical models. In the context of
spontaneous spoken documents that severely disturb syntactic analysis,
other information has to be considered. Semantics for a specific
context could be used instead as additional features for MT models.


Candidate profile

The successful candidate will have a Master's degree (or equivalent
qualification) in Computer Science with a good background in
Computational Linguistics or Artificial intelligence by the time of
appointment.

The PhD will be funded by a grant from the French government. It is
expected to start on october 2011.
Please send a CV to Fabrice Lefèvre (fabrice.lefevre...@univ-avignon.fr) and
Stéphane Huet (stephane.huet...@univ-avignon.fr) by *Monday 20th June*.

For information, please see the website below:
http://ed536.univ-avignon.fr/
(more information for readers of French, others should contact the
supervisors Fabrice Lefèvre or Stéphane Huet)