Formal Concept Analysis For Ontology Engineering

The Orpailleur team offers a 1-year post-doctoral position in Nancy,
France, starting in Autumn 2014. This project aims at improving existing
tools and developing new tools based on Formal Concept Analysis for
building ontologies from structured textual data. Several tracks could
be explored. One of them consists in studying the reduction of a concept
lattices, i.e. check whether the high number of concepts in a concept
lattice can be only represented by attribute concepts and object
concepts (also known as the AOC-poset, which can provide a good
conceptualization of the domain). Another track aims at using extensions
of Formal Concept Analysis, namely Relational Concept Analysis and
Pattern Structures, to model more complex phenomena in knowledge
representation (such as relational aspects). Moreover, providing domain
experts with interaction facilities at the lattice level, introducing
metrics in the lattice (stability...) are also other possible directions
of investigation. The work will involve both theoretical and programming
aspects leading to the development of a running prototype.

Candidates applying for this position should have a PhD in Computer
Sciences with a good background in Knowledge Discovery (Formal Concept
Analysis) and Knowledge Representation. In addition, abilities and
experience in programming in C, C++ or Java are wished.

This work comes within the scope of the "Hybride ANR Project" which aims
at extracting from PubMed texts some knowledge about rares diseases. The
candidate will have to work jointly with another post-doc researcher on
Natural Language Processing that will be in charge of producing
structured data from texts.

LORIA lab is located in Nancy, East of France. It is among the largest
computer science research laboratories in France involving several
research organizations such as CNRS, INRIA Nancy Grand Est and Lorraine
University. It is a very large and challenging research environment with
29 research teams and excellent computing facilities.

Working languages are French or English.

Contact : Yannick.Toussaint@loria.fr