Applications are invited for a Postdoctoral Researcher position within the project “Polyglot Machines: Human-like Learning of Morphologically Rich Languages”, financed by a NWO-VIDI Talent Grant and coordinated by Principal Investigator (PI) dr. Arianna Bisazza. 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.
This project aims to improve language modeling for low-resource morphologically rich languages, taking inspiration from child language acquisition insights. Among other methodologies, an artificial language learning paradigm will be used to simulate the learning of typologically diverse languages and evaluate the effect of known child-directed language properties on the acquisition of morphology and other language aspects.
You will be carrying out your research in the context of the Computational Linguistics group, which is part of the Centre for Language and Cognition of the University of Groningen, The Netherlands.
An important part of your work will be conducted together with the PI and the PhD student that will be hired for the same project. Collaboration is also possible with other PhD students supervised by the PI, as well as other members of CLCG.
Main requirement: A PhD degree in any area related to the tasks (such as Computational Linguistics, Computational Psycholinguistics and Language Acquisition).
Find more details and apply here by 15 February 2024:
https://www.rug.nl/about-ug/work-with-us/job-opportunities/?details=00347-02...
Starting date: Negotiable. Ideally 1 September 2024. The appointment will be for a specified period of 1 year, renewable for up to 2 more years (so up to 3 years in total) following positive evaluation.
For questions about the position: A. Bisazza (do not use email for applications)
a.bisazza@rug.nl
-- Arianna Bisazza Associate Professor University of Groningen http://www.cs.rug.nl/~bisazza