POSTDOCTORAL POSITION at INRIA Rennes, France

Topic: Conditional Random Fields for structured annotation


In the field of natural language processing, statistical methods have
become very popular thanks to their efficiency in dealing with noisy
inputs (e.g., automatic speech transcripts, blog, tweets). In the
particular case of sequence labeling problems, such as named entities
recognition (discovery of person names, places, dates, etc. within a
text), the Conditional Random Fields (CRF) model is particularly
effective .

CRFs are currently limited to model unstructured sequences (flat
representation), while one of the current problems is to predict
structured sequences (tree-structured for example). Methods for
modeling such structured sequences exist, like Probabilistic Context
Free Grammars (PCFG), but their effectiveness is limited when
confronted with noisy input as we are aiming to process.

The proposed work is to study a method for predicting sequences of
structured objects robust to handle noisy inputs. This method will
provide a decomposition of the overall problem into sub-problems
modeled by CRF and redial the different results to produce a
structured output. Evaluation will be performed on noisy texts (speech
transcripts, tweets...).

This work takes place in the context of the Quaero project, funded by
the French National Innovation Agency (www.quaero.org).  The work will
be performed at IRISA/INRIA Rennes, France (http://www.irisa.fr/,
http://www.inria.fr/centre/rennes/). The candidate will integrate the
TexMex team, whose main research topics include large-scale multimedia
indexing, speech processing, information retrieval.

QUALIFICATIONS AND POSITION

The successful candidate will have a PhD with a track record of
Text-Mining or Machine Learning for Natural Language Processing
research. Fluency in English is mandatory.

This position is to be filled as early as possible, and will end on
the 31st of Dec 2013. Salary follows INRIA scales and depends on the
candidate's experience (the minimum monthly net salary is about 1900
¤).

To apply, please send a cover letter, describing how the applicant's
knowledge and research background will contribute to the project, a
CV, and the names and contact information of two referees to:

Christian Raymond (christian.raymond at irisa.fr)