Post-doctoral position in NLP/ML in Orsay, France A post-doctoral position in Machine Learning/Natural Language Processing is open at LIMSI-CNRS (http://www.limsi.fr/) in Orsay (greater Paris area), France. The position is part of a 3-year ANR Grant addressing Natural Language Processing for three regional languages of France: http://restaure.unistra.fr/en/presentation/ Project description The overall objective of the RESTAURE project is to provide computational resources and processing tools for three regional languages of France: Alsatian, Occitan and Picard. To achieve this goal, it will be necessary to develop new computational models suitable for low-resourced and poorly standardized languages. The initial choice of these three languages is motivated by several reasons: they cover various language families and there has been significant work in the areas covered by the project. It will thus be possible to build upon existing work in order to share different approaches, experiences and tools developed in previous projects. Job description The successful candidate will develop part-of-speech tagging tools for the three French regional languages. This task will require proposing innovative methods to meet the challenges of the regional languages: (i) lack of annotated corpora, which excludes building supervised machine learning based taggers from scratch, at least initially; and (ii) variation and lack of standard spelling, which demands that the tools be especially robust. The candidate will thus investigate unsupervised or weakly supervised approaches for part-of-speech tagging, using for example cross-lingual word clusters and delexicalized models. The appointed researcher will work in close collaboration with all teams involved in the Restaure project. Requirements and qualifications - Ph.D. in Computer Science with a focus on Machine Learning or Natural Language Processing - Skills in POS tagging would be an asset - Good publication record - Ability to work in a collaborative environment, with a strong commitment to achieving research goals - Fluent French and/or English, strong oral and written communication skills - Some knowledge of one of the regional languages would be an asset - Solid programming skills Additional information - Application deadline: open until filled - Starting date: September 2016 to February 2017 - Duration: 1 year, renewable depending on performance - Salary: ¤24,800 - ¤35,600/year net depending on experience Applications Applications should include the following: - Cover letter outlining interest in the position and academic goals - CV including a list of publications - Recommendation letters or names and contact information of at least two referees and be sent to Anne-Laure Ligozat (anne-laure.ligozat@limsi.fr) About LIMSI, CNRS LIMSI is a laboratory of the French National Center for Research (CNRS), a leading research institution in Europe. LIMSI is associated with two universities, the University of Paris-Sud, on the grounds of which it is located, and the University Pierre et Marie Curie, through a historical association with the mechanical engineering department. LIMSI is a multi-disciplinary research unit that covers a number of fields from thermodynamics to cognition, encompassing fluid mechanics, energetics, acoustic and voice synthesis, spoken language and text processing, vision, visualization and perception, virtual and augmented reality. LIMSI hosts about 200 researchers, professors, research support staff and graduate students. It is located in a green area about 30 minutes south of Paris.