Applications are open for a Postdoctoral Researcher position within the research project “Polyglot Machines: Human-like Learning of Morphologically Rich Language”,
This is an interdisciplinary project at the intersection of computational linguistics/natural language processing (NLP), computational psycholinguistics, and language acquisition.
Despite the impressive advances made possible by neural networks, current NLP systems are still far from displaying the learning abilities of humans in many languages. By contrast, children around the world acquire extremely diverse languages in comparable time spans and from considerably less linguistic input than that required by neural models.
Tasks
More specifically, research tasks will include:
- reviewing language acquisition literature and detecting salient features of CDL
- developing typologically diverse artificial languages and assessing their learnability by neural language models
- simulating CDL properties in artificial languages
- collaborating with Language Acquisition researchers interested in the simulation of human language learning with neural networks
- applying insights obtained from artificial languages to real low-resource NLP tasks.
Duration: 3 years.
Salary
By the collective labor agreement for Dutch universities, they offer:
- a salary, depending on qualifications and work experience, between € 3,226 and € 4,332 gross per month
- a holiday allowance of 8% gross annual income
- an 8.3% end-of-the-year allowance
- excellent work-life balance.
Job Requirements
To qualify, the candidate should have:
- a PhD degree in any area related to the tasks (such as Computational Linguistics, Computational Psycholinguistics and Languages Acquisition)
- aptitude for interdisciplinary research
- an independent, proactive work ethic and team playing skills
- excellent academic writing skills in English
- not required, but a big plus: experience with computational morphology and/or artificial language learning with human participants.
Application Process
Applications in one pdf should include:
- a motivation letter describing why they wish to do this research and why they are the right person to do it
- a full curriculum vitae, demonstrating academic excellence, and including publications
- a research proposal fitting to the theme of the project and reflecting their own research interests (1 or 2 pages max, excluding references)
- contact details of two academic referees.
To apply for the post-doctoral researcher position in low-resource NLP and computational modeling of Language Learning, click here.
Deadline: February 15, 2024.
For more information on post-doctoral researchers in low-resource NLP and computational modeling of language learning, visit the official site.
