XPost: comp.ai.nat-lang, sci.cognitive   
      
   The Human-Level Intelligence Laboratory at Rensselaer has just been   
   awarded a MURI grant on "Unified Theories of Language and Cognition".   
   As a consequence, we have funding for several graduate student,   
   postdoctoral and research programmer positions.   
      
   The project aims to develop a unified computational theory of language   
   use that significantly expands the ability of computers to understand   
   language and explains how people use background knowledge and context   
   to achieve deep understanding of language even when it is highly   
   ambiguous, novel, ungrammatical and/or metaphorical.  Many aspects of   
   this problem (for example, the reasoning algorithms and ontologies   
   involved) are not specific to language and thus an interest in   
   language is not strictly necessary to participate.   
      
   Rensselaer is located in the Hudson Valley, equidistant from Boston   
   and New York City.  It is conceivable that we could work something out   
   with someone who is constrained to reside near one of those cities.   
      
   Our primary criterion for bringing new people into the lab is the   
   intelligence, curiosity, energy and motivation needed to solve the   
   problems involved in this project.  Background in one or more of the   
   following areas, would help, though is not necessary:   
      
   * Linguistics.  Formal syntax and semantics, construction grammars and   
   pragmatics are especially relevant.   
      
   * Reasoning algorithms.  Our work integrates multiple forms of   
   reasoning algorithms, including those based on first-order logic, SAT,   
   probability theory and analogy.   
      
   * Ontologies. Our approach is knowledge-intensive and will require the   
   ability to acquire and organize this knowledge.   
      
   * Semantic Web.  We will be interfacing with information available in   
   many machine-readable, distributed knowledge bases.  There are many   
   interesting problems involved in using this information for reasoning   
   and language understanding.   
      
   * Software engineering.  All our work is integrated within a single   
   cognitive architecture.  This presents several interesting software   
   engineering challenges.   
      
   If you are interested in a position, please send a note to me at   
   cassin at rpi dot edu.   
      
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