[Amdnl] Grounded Language Learning PhD position at CNRS (Paris, France)

[Michael Spranger]

To all interested,

We are seeking applications for 3 year fully funded PhD position on Natural language learning at CNRS in Paris. We are particularly interested in grounded, incremental learning of representations that allow robots to understand and produce Natural language utterances in robot-robot or human-robot interaction scenarios. Although in principle grounded, the meaning representations can also be more abstract (e.g. higher-order logic, Abstract Meaning Representation). Evaluation will be based on robot data, but also standard datasets from NLP.

The PhD is funded in the context of the ERA-NET Atlantis project (https://ai.vub.ac.be/atlantis) aiming at developing algorithms to study the emergence of language in a community of robots. The PhD candidate will be based at Lattice (Paris, France) but will work closely with the Atlantis partners - especially the Sony Computer Science Laboratories Inc in Tokyo (Japan) and the Vrije Universiteit Brussels (Belgium).
 
We are looking for a candidate with the following skills:
- advanced programming skills (Lisp, Python)
- strong mathematical skills 
- a good knowledge of machine learning techniques
- fluent in English

The following skills would be a plus
- previous experience in natural language processing
- familiarity with techniques in Semantic Parsing, Statistical and Deep learning for NLP
- experience with robots 
- proficiency in French

If you are interested, please write to Thierry Poibeau (thierry.poibeau at ens.fr) as soon as possible, with a CV, a grade statement and the names and email of two academic referees (who may be contacted later on, we don’t need reference letter at this stage). The successful candidate is expected to begin in October 2016 (but later dates are also possible). Salary will be between 1500 and 1600 euros net.