Question Answering is a relatively new subfield of Information Retrieval
aimed at returning to the user either explicit answers, or at least
passages containing them, in response to fact-seeking questions.  This is
in distinction from traditional IR which simply returns lists of document
ids.  To do well at QA, the system must perform, at a minimum, shallow NLP
and employ some world knowledge.  We are looking for a summer student to
assist us in the task of integrating an ontology with our QA system and
expanding the ontology for specific domains.  The applicant should have a
background in computational linguistics, cognitive science, knowledge
representation or related field, and have good programming skills; advanced
graduate students are preferred.  Please send resumes to

<pre>
    Dr. John M. Prager
    IBM T.J. Watson Research Center
    P.O. Box 704, Yorktown Heights, NY 10598, USA
    jprager@us.ibm.com
</pre>

<p>To find out more about summer jobs in general at IBM Research, go
to <a
href="http://www.research.ibm.com/summerjobs/"><tt>http://www.research.ibm.com/summerjobs/</tt></a>.