From: harrisn@ccs.northeastern.edu (Coleman Harrison)
Newsgroups: misc.jobs.offered
Subject: Machine Translation project leader
Date: 2 Oct 92 21:18:22 GMT
Distribution: na
Organization: College of CS, Northeastern U


CompuServe Information Service is a public information service which 
offers on-line access to hundreds of databases on many subjects.  
Electronic mail, computer and software support forums, newswires, and 
stock quotations are some of the many services available.  The user is 
typically an individual at home with a PC and a modem, paying a fee per 
connect hour or per month for the information. The user avoids long 
distance telephone charges because CompuServe has a network with nodes 
all over the place so that nearly all users can reach the system with a local 
telephone call.  We currently have 1,000,000 members, all but 25,000 in 
the U.S. and Canada, but we are expanding into Europe and are already 
offering quite a bit of content in German, with French to come.  The 
information service business volume is about $150 million per year.
 
The main goal of the machine translation project is to provide draft-quality 
translation directly to end users.  For example, we hope that German and 
French users can access on-line English information and have it translated 
for them.  We suspect that there is a market for low-cost translations, even 
if the quality is marginal.  Obviously, if we can get the quality above 
marginal for some domains, that's even better.

MT systems work most successfully with well-formed input texts and with 
a restricted domain of subject matter.  Our texts are subdivided into many 
small domains, but they are not very well-formed.  Therefore we want to 
evaluate what level of quality we can get with machine translation 
systems and proceeding from that point determine how to deploy MT in 
our services.

The goals of the project are as follows:

* Identify the best available French and German MT systems relative to 
	our needs
* Evaluate the customer acceptance of their output
* License the system and bring it up on our network
* Enhance lexicons and rules to improve quality for subdomains
* Expand to additional languages

I am seeking an individual who can take over this whole effort.  In 
addition to knowledge of systems analysis, computational linguistics, and 
fluent in French, the individual must also be a self starter, be able to deal 
with people and organizations, and ultimately be able to build a group.  I 
have looked into MT and defined the goals of the project, but it is not 
really my area of expertise and I have other things to focus on, so the 
more self-sufficient the person is, the better.  

The specific work to be done includes:  

1. Perform detailed evaluations of four to eight machine translation 
products or systems.  Both commercial and pre-commercial systems should 
be considered.  This involves getting the software installed; running test 
translations; and making evaluations of the results.  Factors to evaluate 
include:  assessment of output quality, machine resource consumption and 
processing time, user interface, degree to which output quality can be 
improved by adding lexicon and language rule entries, and potential for 
system improvement over the next 5 years.

2. Visit vendors and negotiate terms, assisted by me.  Contact customer 
references, etc.  These two steps should be complete in 6 months.

3. Based on the above, select a product.  Bring it in-house and implement a 
working system.

4. Enhance lexicons and perhaps language rules in a set of subject areas.  A 
more junior person may be added at this point if the volume of work is 
large, but I want the initial hire to be a "hands on" person who does not 
shy away from day to day work with the system.
        
5. Start work on a second and third language after English <-> French is 
well along.

6. Report directly to me; disseminate information to a number of interested 
groups within CompuServe.

The position is open immediately.  US citizenship, green card, or permanent 
resident status is required.

Please note that this notice was originally posted in August, but our plans 
have now changed to prioritize French as opposed to German, so I am 
reposting the above updated description of the position.