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The EPSRC-funded project ‘WhatIf: Answering \u2018what if \u2026?\u2019 Questions for\u00a0Ontology Authoring’ is seeking to build a dialogue system allowing a person\u00a0who is building a semantic web ontology to ask \u2018what if \u2026?\u2019 questions about\u00a0possible additions and changes to the ontology and get meaningful answers.<\/p>\n
This involves automated reasoning about what the consequences of a\u00a0change in the ontology would be and intelligent presentation of the results.\u00a0Because in general there will be infinitely many new logical consequences,\u00a0the system will have to understand something about what the person is trying\u00a0to do and what sorts of results will be most interesting to them. It is assumed\u00a0that this information can best be provided by the person in the context of a\u00a0natural dialogue system.We are seeking a Computational Linguist to lead the theoretical and practical\u00a0design and development of the dialogue system (other researchers will be\u00a0investigating issues of efficient reasoning and issues of how to model the\u00a0process of ontology authoring). The dialogue system is expected to use\u00a0structured input (including an approach to specifying complex content based\u00a0on \u201cediting\u201d natural text (see paper by Power in European Workshop on\u00a0Natural Language Generation 2009) rather than free natural language text or\u00a0speech, but nevertheless is required to be natural and to select and present\u00a0information coherently.<\/p>\n
You should have, or be about to acquire, a PhD in Computer Science\/Artificial Intelligence\/ Computational Linguistics, with experience of natural\u00a0language processing research at the postgraduate level and experience of\u00a0implementing software for users. Research interests in conversational\u00a0implicature\/ relevance, logics and reasoning, dialogue moves and structures,\u00a0the semantic web and requirements elicitation\/ evaluation with users would all\u00a0be advantageous but are not essential.<\/p>\n
For more information, please go to\u00a0http:\/\/www.abdn.ac.uk\/jobs\/index.php<\/a>\u00a0click on \u201cexternal applicants\u201d and search for the post with reference number\u00a01253433. Application is online via that web site. Questions about the post,\u00a0but not applications, can be sent to Chris Mellish at the email address below.<\/p>\n