Postdoctoral Research Scientist Position open at Columbia University in Spoken Dialogue Systems

Position:  Research and prototype development of a Spoken Dialogue System

Project Description:

The Spoken and Natural Language Processing groups at Columbia University in New York City have an opening for a computational linguist with expertise in research in and implementation of Spoken Dialogue Systems, with experience in Natural Language Generation. Some familiarity with multilingual processing is a plus.  The Spoken Language Processing and Natural Language Processing groups are collaborating on a large DARPA project to develop state-of-the-art Spoken Dialogue Systems.  We will experiment with   developing new confidence metrics for guiding confirmation strategies, strategies for clarification sub-dialogues, new types of reference generation, and combining prosody and text to produce effective system prompts.

The Speech Group and the NLP Group at Columbia have years of expertise in Natural Language Generation, Spoken Dialogue Systems, prosody, and multilingual processing  and work in close collaboration with Research Scientists at the Columbia Center for Computational Learning Systems, who will also participate in this project.  The successful candidate will be expected to play a major role in prototyping two Spoken Dialogue Systems to be built during different phases of the project and transferring these to a small team of developers who will create the final systems.  One system will perform simple interactions with a robot, and the other will support dialogue in translation.  The candidate will also play a major role in the research undertaken with these systems.

The position is available for an initial period of two years with possible extension for 3 additional years, depending upon renewal of funding.   Qualified applicants should have:

• A PhD or equivalent to U.S. PhD in computational linguistics or spoken language processing
• Several years’ experience with building spoken dialog systems and/or natural language generation systems
• Familiarity with multilingual systems
• Good implementational skills (Java, Python and/or C++)
• Good English writing skills
• The ability to work both independently and in a team in a multidisciplinary environment
  
  

Conditions of Employment:
the position is available from September/October 2011 or until filled

Please address questions about the position and send your application and most current CV (and ask for 3 reference letters to be sent) in email to:

Julia Hirschberg

Department of Computer Science

Columbia University

julia@cs.columbia.edu

Columbia is an equal opportunity and affirmative action employer.