A four-year postdoctoral position at Macquarie University's Centre for Language Technology will focus on dialog management and language generation aspects of the head. We seek someone who has experience either in the development of sophisticated dialog systems or in spoken natural language generation. The successful candidate will (a) contribute to the development of the general framework and the design, implementation and integration of various parts of the project, and (b) focus on specific aspects of dialog management and utterance generation as appropriate to their particular skills. Two areas of research we are particularly keen to explore are (a) the process of negotiation and the handling of miscommunications; and (b) the production of richly annotated output to drive a visually and aurally compelling head. The appointee will be supervised by Professor Robert Dale, and will work closely with the interdisciplinary team of engineers, computer scientists and psychologists spread across the project sites.
See the University's employment web site for further administrative details regarding the position; search for position number 20860. For more information on technical aspects, email Professor Robert Dale at rdale@ics.mq.edu.au.
The University of Western Sydney, Macquarie University, Flinders University and the University of Canberra are offering up to 4 Postgraduate Research Scholarships under a joint ARC/NHMRC Thinking Systems Special Initiative grant to build an Embodied Conversational Agent.
The PhD Scholarship at Macquarie University's Centre for Language Technology is to work on Utterance Generation and Dialogue Modelling. For our Head to be a convincing head, it has not only to understand its conversational participant, it has also to reason about what they say, and respond appropriately. This much is true of any Embodied Conversational Agent; what makes our Head different is that we want it to make appropriate use of prosody and facial expression when it talks, so that, for example, it might talk in a more soothing tone of voice when it is trying to tone a situation down, and frown or smile at the right times in delivering bad or good news.
These topics have been the subject of existing research; guided by a strong experimental bias in the project, we want to go beyond what others have done, and strive to build a Head which uses facial expression and intonation to be truly effective in achieving its communicative goals.
If you are interested in working on this exciting project for your PhD, contact Robert.Dale@mq.edu.au.
Scholarships are also available in other areas of the project at other participating laboratories: