Computational Linguistics

Need professionals that have done similar work in the area of computational linguistics (A) How to "understand"/disambiguate natural language English phrases enough to map them onto standardized transaction "templates" (some example templates are attached). Typical tools used for this are parsers, lexicons (e.g. WordNet), temporal phrase recognizers . (B) How to externalize the template data, follow-up question patterns, and rule structures as meta-data so that the non-programmers can vastly increase the capabilities of the program by creating meta-data. (C) More speculatively, practical knowledge of the use of ontologies might be a plus. We want to start modelling generic "stores", "travel agents", etc. so that suppliers could themselves create "connectors" from the data in their particular web-sites to our system (D) The ability to record and use an extensive array of user historical data and user preferences and pre-stored individual data - and code to use that personal data "intelligently" in performing transactions for the user. (E) Good web-page/web-site design and operation, preferably using AJAX techniques and especially targeted at web-pages that will be used on mobile/iPhone type devices. (F) Once the user has specified a task we will need pre-canned (but modifiable on the fly as appropriate) work-flows to actually carry out the user's tasks. We have begun using Microsoft Workflow Foundation, externalized as XAML, to accomplish this. Since the execution of a task may stretch over a considerable time we need to have strong task persistence in the event of server restart, etc. (G) We need the ability to attach to and use a number of web services and APIs (Amazon, Google, etc.) to actually perform transactions for the user, as driven by the task's workflow. (H) Potentially, code to spider the Web looking for data for named entity recognition, sites where transactions can be carried out, etc.