Natural language research announcements

["Girju, Corina R" <girju AT illinois.edu>]

FYI.
_____________________________
From: Risse, Hildreth 
[Hildreth.Risse AT ask.com]
Sent: Wednesday, May 04, 2011 2:04 PM
To: Girju, Corina R
Subject: Referrals

Hi Dr. Girju,

I’m in the HR department at Ask.com and we’re currently looking for a 
Research Engineer with an NLP/Computational Linguistics background.  If you 
have any colleagues/friends/former students who are looking for an industry 
position in the San Francisco/Bay Area, I’d love to hear from you.

I’m inserting the spec for the position below and attaching it in Word 
format.  Please feel free to pass it on (along with my contact information) 
to anyone you feel might be interested, and of course, I’m available to 
answer any questions you or they might have.

Thanks and best regards,
Hildreth

Hildreth Risse
Human Resources/Recruiter, Ask.com
A Division of IAC  (www.iac.com<http://www.iac.com>)
555 12th Street, Suite 1100, Oakland, CA 94607
510-985-7519 office
510-842-1578 fax
hildreth.risse AT ask.com<mailto:hildreth.risse AT ask.com>
Skype: hrisse1



Research Engineer - Natural Language Processing
About Us
Join the #1 brand and top Web property focused on answering people’s 
questions. At Ask.com, we’re building a next-generation Q&A service – 
spanning both the Web and mobile devices -- that combines the power of search 
with insight from real users. Our proprietary algorithms crawl the web for 
question and answer pairs (400 million and growing), fueling one of the 
biggest Q&A databases on the Web.  This unique technology, combined with 
answers from real users in our community, makes Ask.com the most 
comprehensive Q&A service around. At Ask, we empower each individual to 
succeed, communicate their ideas, and take action. When you work here, you 
know your contributions will have a direct and immediate impact on the 
company. We are serious about creating and maintaining a company culture that 
is both innovative and fun, and we’re looking for great people to come join 
our team.

Summary
Ask.com is looking for a software engineer to join a research-oriented team 
in the Oakland, CA office.  The research engineer will join a horizontal team 
supporting the Ask.com core language technologies, which power the search- 
and database-driven question answering solutions as well as the algorithmic 
language processing infrastructure for the Q&A community and mobile 
applications.
Required:

 *   Natural language processing / computational linguistics background.  
Ideal: information retrieval and machine learning applications
 *   Python and/or Perl, shell scripting, XML. Ideal: some Java and/or C/C++, 
familiarity with SQL and relational databases

 *    Ph.D. in computational linguistics / natural language processing or 
related areas.

Skills and Experience:

 *   3+ plus years experience in natural language processing / computational 
linguistics in industry or large scale academic research project.
 *   Expertise in at least some of the following specific NLP areas and 
topics: question answering, lexical semantics, collocations, terminology 
extraction, multi-word expressions, (shallow) parsing, named entity 
recognition, lexical acquisition, paraphrasis acquisition, information 
extraction, text classification, evaluation methodologies.
 *   In general, experience is desired in web analytics, both in terms of 
using the web as corpus (including the family of related approaches, 
techniques, issues) and in terms of search engine query logs analysis / user 
behavior modeling.
 *   Familiarity with existing data resources and tools: Wordnet, POS 
taggers, parsers, LingPipe, SVMLight, NLTK, Weka, and similar tools.
 *   Ideal: practical experience with Lucene/Solr, Mahout and the Hadoop 
ecosystem.
 *   Ideal: experience with ontologies, RDF, other semantic web resources or 
tools.
 *   Ability to develop prototypes based on proprietary or open source tools.
 *   Ability to work in a fast-paced environment and adapt to shifting 
conditions, priorities, deadlines.
 *   The ideal candidate should be able to refer to products and/or research 
prototypes that they have developed or to which they have contributed, or to 
their contributions to sites like StackOverflow.
Location:  Downtown Oakland (near 12th St. BART Station)

Attachment: Research Engineer-NLP Req.docx
Description: Research Engineer-NLP Req.docx