Internships in Natural Language Processing
                     USC/Information Sciences Institute
                                Summer 2000

We are looking for interested and qualified students (graduate and
undergraduate) to spend the summer working with ongoing research
projects at USC/ISI on natural language processing, machine learning,
statistical modeling, automatic translation, human/computer dialog,
discourse analysis, and other areas. Currently we have several
positions open:

1. Statistical Machine Translation

Translating human languages (e.g., Chinese to English) is a
longstanding challenge for computer science. We have began a new
project in applying statistical methods to this problem, extracting
large amounts of relevant translation knowledge automatically from
bilingual text (e.g., Hong Kong government documents). We face many
interesting challenges in this quest to improve significantly on the
quality of commercially available translators, and to build
translation systems for "small" languages that are not of commercial
interest. For more information, visit
http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/rewrite/.


2. Discourse Analysis and Text Compression

Coherent texts are not simple sequences of clauses and sentences, but
rather complex artifacts with a highly elaborate structure. For
example, one paragraph in a text may elaborate on an idea presented in
another paragraph; the elaboration may consist of three arguments; the
first argument may be justified by some extra semantic information;
and the third argument may hold despite some expectations not being
satisfied. Our research is aimed at extending within a probabilistic
framework our prior work on discourse parsing and at investigating how
automatically derived discourse structures can be exploited in natural
language applications, such as text and sentence compression, and
machine translation.

3. Human/Computer Dialog for Automated Agents in Simulations

Human/computer speech dialog is a research area of increasing
importance. We are working on dialog in the context of virtual-reality
simulations, where automated agents interact with people and with each
other. Natural language is critical for making these simulations seem
real. We are also working on "chatterbot" technology to provide
robust, realistic conversation capabilities for automated agents. This
work is being carried out in collaboration with USC's new Institute
for Creative Technologies, which is bringing together Hollywood
scriptwriters, game designers, artificial intelligence scientists, and
state-of-the-art virtual reality graphics/sound to build compelling
simulated worlds. [NOTE: we are also looking for a full-time research
programmer for this project.]

4. Speech Recognition and/or Synthesis

We are looking to extend many of our natural language projects into
speech; these include machine translation and dialog. Possible
projects include: speech-to-speech translation, improvements to speech
synthesis, and speech technology for verbal agents.

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If you are interested, please contact Kevin Knight
(http://www.isi.edu/~knight/, knight@isi.edu) or Daniel Marcu
(http://www.isi.edu/~marcu/, marcu@isi.edu)! For more information
about NLP research activities at USC/ISI, visit the site at
http://www.isi.edu/natural-language/nlp-at-isi.html. ISI is an
academic research institute that is part of USC's School of
Engineering. Visit http://www.isi.edu/ to see a range of artificial
intelligence research projects in ISI's Intelligent Systems
Division. USC/ISI is located in Marina del Rey on the Southern
California coast, convenient to beaches, restaurants, boating, bike
paths, and shopping.

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