Xerox Research Centre Europe, located in Grenoble, is offering the following internship for Fall 2015: *----------------------------------------------------------------------* *Weighted tree-based transducers for natural language generation in the context of a dialogue system* *----------------------------------------------------------------------* See: http://www.xrce.xerox.com/About-XRCE/Internships/Weighted-tree-based-transducers-for-natural-language-generation-in-the-context-of-a-dialogue-system Contact: Marc Dymetman marc.dymetman@xrce.xerox.com *Duration*: 4 to 5 months *Start Date*: As soon as possible after September 2015 Description: In the context of a human-machine dialogue system being developed at XRCE, the internship will have aim of exploring the applicability of weighted/probabilistic finite-state tree transducers (and related formalisms such as tree-to-string transducers) to the problem of generating textual utterances from semantic representations produced by a DM (dialogue manager). The advantages of such transducers are that they support operations such as composition and intersection (in particular with language models), and are well-suited for reversible processing (parsing as the reverse of generation). The internship will build on work done at XRCE with string-based transducers, which it will attempt to adapt and extend towards tree-based machines, either based on external toolkits (such as Tiburon [May and Knight 2006]) or on specially developed software. The ideal candidate should be a Computer Science student at the Master or (preferably) PhD level, with some experience of weighted tree-based transducers (or at least string-based transducers), as well as of associated software tools. Strong programming skills are a requirement (Python, C++, Java...). Conference publication of the work will be strongly encouraged. Please note that applicants must be registered students at a university or other academic institution and that this establishment will need to sign an 'Internship Convention' with Xerox before the student is accepted. If you would like to submit your application, please send it to marc.dymetman@xrce.xerox.com or to xrce-candidates@xrce.xerox.com . Please mention "*Tree based transducers*" in your subject line.