Post-doctoral position open - Statistical Machine Translation, LIMSI, 
Orsay-Paris (France)

(1) SUMMARY
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Profile              : Statistical Machine Translation
                        Automatic Paraphrasing
                        Natural Language Processing
Duration             : one year
Starting date        : from October 2010
Application deadline : September 30th, 2010
Laboratory           : LIMSI-CNRS, Orsay-Paris, France
                        http://www.limsi.fr
Salary               : 2038¤ euros/month
Contact              : Aurélien Max (aurelien.max@limsi.fr) and
                        François Yvon (yvon@limsi.fr)

(2) CONTEXT
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The TRACE project (http://anrtrace.limsi.fr) studies the potential 
impact of automatic preprocessing on source texts on the quality of 
Statistical Machine Translation output. In this context, one of the 
areas under focus is concerned with producing semantically-compatible 
alternative views of the source text. Various automatic paraphrasing 
techniques for generating multiple text views and for encoding them are 
investigated. One of the desired outcome of the project is the ability 
to trace down expected improvements to individual linguistic phenomena, 
initially for the French<->English language pair.

Relevant bibliography:

Nitin Madnani (2010) The Circle of Meaning: From Translation to 
Paraphrasing and Back. PhD Dissertation, University of Maryland College Park
Chris Callison-Burch (2007) Paraphrasing and Translation. PhD Thesis, 
University of Edinburgh


(3) APPLICATION PROCEDURE
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Candidates interested in this project should have a recent PhD in a 
relevant field and a strong publication record. Familiarity with SMT is 
required, and knowledge of paraphrase acquisition techniques is highly 
desirable. The working languages at LIMSI are French and English. LIMSI 
is located in Orsay, near Paris.

Candidates should send a detailed CV including links to their most 
significant publications and the names of two referees to Aurélien Max
(aurelien.max@limsi.fr) and François Yvon (yvon@limsi.fr)

Application deadline: September 30th, 2010