Post-doc Orange Labs

Bonjour, Hello,

Orange Labs (to Lannion in France) is currently offering a post-doc for a
year. Applications are invited from France, EU or international young phd's
(less than a year) in computer science or NLP.

*Context* :

A major challenge in computational linguistics is to generate a conceptual
representation of documents by identifying the adequate “meaning” of terms.
The varying concepts associated with the words constitute the conceptual
space needed for further processing (extracting semantic relations,
thematisation, …)

*Subject* :

The Natural Language Processing Team (CONTENT/FAST) of Orange Labs is
currently working on information extraction in order to obtain a RDF
representation. We base this work on existing knowledge bases (internal
ones as well as community efforts like DBpedia or LinkedOpenData in
general).

The successful candidate will first extend our semantic data by merging it
with public resources (linked opend data, linguistic linked open data like
WordNet, BabelNet, DBpedia, Wiktionary etc). This increase should be
quantitative by mainly adding named entities but also qualitative (using
owl:sameAs) by targeting conceptual hierarchies (e.g. WordNet).

In a second step, the candidate will implement access to this space by
coupling it to our NLP tools (extraction of semantic links from a text).
The overall treatment will be applied to corpora in order to study the
impact of each resource on the result of an analysis. The result of the
study should provide information to determine the actual value of these
resources and how to use them together. Another, more fundamental, study
will concern the concept granularity. The number and the nature of the
various concepts associated to a term (word) is an open problem which
depends on the data to be handled.

*Requirements*:

- a PhD in computer science or computational linguistics obtained during
the last 12 months
- knowledge in ontology alignment and the Semantic Web (technologies
- (formats, ontologies, …)
- knowledge in computational linguistics, syntactic and semantic analysis
- Java, c++ programming languages, Linux
- Working knowledge of French

For details, please contact:

Dr. Johannes Heinecke
Phone: +33 2 96 05 21 77
Email : johannes.heinecke(at)orange.com

Best Regards.

Julien Plu.