School of Computing and Communications Salary: £29,619 to £34,308 Closing Date: Friday 26 August 2022 Interview Date: To be confirmed Reference: 0809-22 https://hr-jobs.lancs.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx?ref=0809-22

The School of Computing and Communications (SCC) within Lancaster University’s Faculty of Science and Technology, is seeking to appoint a Research Associate (RA) to work on two connected research projects on Natural Language Processing (NLP) for the Welsh language. FreeTxt/TestunRhydd (https://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/freetxt/) is funded by the AHRC as a follow-on funding for impact and engagement project. Thesawrws (https://corcencc.org/thesawrws/) is funded by the Welsh Government and will use word embeddings and other NLP techniques to create an open-access, freely-available online thesaurus of contemporary Welsh.

Working together with project partners at Cardiff University (led by Dr Dawn Knight as PI), and stakeholders in the FreeTxt/TestunRhydd project advisory group (National Trust Wales, Cadw, National Museum Wales), the RA will continue the co-design, development and implementation of a well documented and thoroughly tested Streamlit web-based software prototype for supporting bilingual free-text survey and questionnaire data analysis. While a range of sophisticated digital tools for the analysis of text-based data are already available, particularly for researchers working in academia, in marketing and public relations contexts etc., many of the digital resources used are not necessarily affordable, quick and easy to use, and/or accessible to non-expert users. Specifically, these tools currently do not fully support the task of systematically processing free-text responses in Welsh. The FreeTxt/TestunRhydd project aims to bridge this gap between quantitative and qualitative forms of survey data by building the novel FreeTxt toolkit which is designed to support the analysis and visualisation of multiple forms of open-ended, free-text data in both English and Welsh.

In the Thesawrws project, the RA will work on developing an open-access, freely available online thesaurus of the Welsh language, for Welsh speakers and learners alike. The RA’s work will draw on pre-existing word embeddings to find related words, and the CorCenCC project Welsh semantic tagger and human evaluators to refine the similarities to enhance this resource. For the language user, this represents a valuable resource which goes beyond traditional thesauri and it will be available publicly as a fully bilingual, user-friendly website, released via the main CorCenCC project website (http://www.corcencc.org/).

The RA will be part of an internationally recognised centre of expertise for corpus-based natural language processing (UCREL), and will work directly with Professor Paul Rayson and Dr Mo El-Haj in SCC. For more details, please see the associated job description and person specification for this position. Potential candidates can also make informal enquiries to Professor Paul Rayson (p.rayson@lancaster.ac.ukmailto:p.rayson@lancaster.ac.uk) and Dr Mo El-Haj (m.el-haj@lancaster.ac.ukmailto:m.el-haj@lancaster.ac.uk).

This is a full-time position expected to start in September 2022, and the RA will join on an indefinite contract, however the role remains contingent on external funding, which for this position which for this position ends 10th March 2023.

Lancaster University are committed to family-friendly and flexible working policies on an individual basis. The School is also an Athena Swan Bronze Award holder, driving good employment practice and initiatives to address gender inequalities in Computing higher education and research. We welcome applications from people in all diversity groups.

-- Paul Rayson Director of UCREL and Professor of Natural Language Processing Group Lead (SCC Data Science) School of Computing and Communications, InfoLab21, Lancaster University, Lancaster, LA1 4WA, UK. Web: http://www.research.lancs.ac.uk/portal/en/people/Paul-Rayson/ Tel: +44 1524 510357 Contact me on Teamshttps://teams.microsoft.com/l/chat/0/0?users=p.rayson@lancaster.ac.uk