Postdoctoral Position on Robots Learning Semantic Description of Objects from Web resources – ALOOF (Autonomous Learning of the Meaning of Objects) – CHIST-ERA European project
Context:
The Wimmics team at INRIA is a partner of the ALOOF (Autonomous Learning of the Meaning of Objects) CHIST-ERA European project, which goal is to enable robots and autonomous systems working with and for humans to exploit the vast amount of knowledge on the Web in order to learn about previously unseen objects involved in human activities, and to use this knowledge when acting in the real world. More precisely, the project scenario consists of an open-ended domestic setting where robots have to find objects.
In this context, we propose a framework based on « machine reading » to extract formally encoded knowledge from unstructured text. Given the robot domestic setting scenario, we focus on extracting the following information about objects: i) the type of the object, ii) where it is typically located (Basile et al. EKAW 2016), and iii) common semantic frames involving the object (Basile et al. ECAI demo paper, Shah et al. AnSWeR).
Our approach combines linguistic and semantic analysis of natural language with entity linking and formal reasoning to create a knowledge base of common sense knowledge. The extracted knowledge is represented as RDF triples. We leverage curated resources (e.g. DBpedia, BabelNet) and learn from the unstructured Web when a knowledge gap occurs.
Job description:
We are looking for a Postdoctoral researcher with a background in Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (in particular Semantic Web and Linked Data) to join the Inria WIMMICS team (http://wimmics.inria.fr).
The goal of this postdoctoral position is to manage the knowledge resources created within the project. In particular, the following research tasks will be addressed:
– design the representation framework for the acquired knowledge
– extend the existing resources both in size and functionalities
– publish the resources as Linked Data
Profile:
Mandatory requirements for applicants:
1. PhD in Computer Science or related field;
2. Experience in Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Semantic Web, and in a related field (NLP, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning…);
3. Hands-on programming experience;
4. Self-motivated, goal-oriented and willing to work in an international team;
5. Fluent English is mandatory.
Optional:
1. Good control of scripting tools (bash, Unix/Linux tools) and of web languages;
2. Experience with automation of NLP processing chains
Job duration: 12 months
Deadline: open until filled
Working environment: the postdoc will be employed at Inria Sophia Antipolis, France, in the Wimmics team
Salary: Gross Salary per month according to the level of diploma and the experience in the domain: 2500 – 2800€ / month (corresponding to 2100-2300€ net salary / month)
Contact email: « Elena Cabrio »