We are looking for a PhD candidate for a fully-funded 4-year project focusing on multilingual NLP, including extremely low-resource languages.

The PhD project is part of the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) Evolving Language (www.evolvinglanguage.ch), a Swiss consortium with the ambitious goal of creating a new discipline, Evolutionary Language Science, that targets the past and future of language. The consortium consists of leading scientists from traditionally separated academic domains, which allows us to harvest the diverse expertise from the humanities, social sciences, computational sciences, natural sciences and medicine towards a broad-scale interdisciplinary collaboration.

Within this framework, the successful candidate will be expected to investigate how new terms emerge in a given language and how they spread in different contexts, thereby comparing Western societies with hunter-gatherer societies. This task is led by computational linguists and evolutionary anthropologists from the USI Università della Svizzera italiana and the University of Zurich (UZH): Prof. Lonneke van der Plas, Prof. Lena Jäger, and Prof. Andrea Migliano.

The ideal candidate should satisfy the following requirements: • A Master (or equivalent title) in Computational Linguistics, Natural Language Processing, or related disciplines, such as Computer Science or Computational Cognitive Science • High personal interest in multilingual approaches to NLP, low-resource languages, and language change • Expertise in machine learning and computational modelling of language (change) • Good skills in oral and written English (official language of the Ph.D. program) • Good oral and writing skills in one (or more) national Swiss languages. Italian is particularly welcome. • Ability to work independently and to plan and direct own work • Motivation to engage in the elaboration of a PhD dissertation. Ability to work in team and autonomy in scheduling research steps. Interest in teaching and tutoring students and availability to collaborate with colleagues, especially with colleagues from the different disciplines of the NCCR Evolving Language (engage in scientific dialogue, listen and think critically) are required.

More information and a link to apply for the position can be found here: https://sites.google.com/site/lonnekenlp/phd-positions-available