Building a Dynamically Extensible Knowledge Structure

We work at building a machine to read and understand complex text. A necessary component is the ability to expand the machine’s knowledge by looking up a word in a dictionary, but human-readable dictionaries are not organised to suit machines. The project involves solving all the problems of a dictionary interface – how knowledge should be structured, “fixing up” dictionary definitions so they are coherent and supportable without being dissertations, handling words with 70 meanings (“run” has 74), or representing words that can be several parts of speech. You will need to be very good at all of Abstract Reasoning, Spatial Reasoning, Verbal Reasoning, and have an inquiring mind. We are too small to cover for any weaknesses you may have (being brilliant in one area, and attempting to move everything into that area won't work). You will also need very superior error checking skill - the day when the machine can fix your errors is still a while off, and you will be handling a mass of detail. You will need to be ruthless in making your work error-free – the machine cannot be the sum of all the errors of its builders. You will need to be able to spy on your unconscious mind, or at least infer from input and output the sorts of structures it builds to represent knowledge (this is harder than it sounds - your unconscious mind can handle vastly more variables than your conscious mind can - it, poor thing, is limited to four pieces of information in play at once, so basically it should be impossible to infer anything of what your unconscious mind is doing, but we won't tell you it is impossible, just that it is hard). You must be a native speaker of English, be comfortable with formal and informal English text (if your eyes glaze when you see legal or technical text, then probably not, although legal text is not a priority), and be a sophisticated user of the language. We have attached some aspects of what we do - if you wish to send us your CV, please prune it to skills and experiences that are relevant. Some skills we would expect: Systems Engineering - the ability to construct and manage a large and complex abstract self-learning structure, with sensitivity to speed, accuracy and the use of computer resources. Programming - We use Delphi Pascal, but programming is not what we are about - we create operators that the machine can assemble in an active structure to represent the structures of language, so the amount of programming skill you need is minimal (but not non-existent). This would be a long term project, so your CV will need to convince us an online IQ test is called for, and then a more detailed personality assessment, to be sure you are going to be happy banging your head on a brick wall over the course of several years.