The Computation, Cognition and Language group at Idiap in Martigny (Switzerland) invites applications for a 4-year funded PhD position that aims to investigate how new terms emerge and how they spread in different contexts, thereby comparing Western societies with hunter-gatherer societies.

RESEARCH ENVIRONMENT:

The position will be 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 broadscale interdisciplinary collaboration. Within this framework we offer a position in an interdisciplinary team of computational linguists and evolutionary anthropologists from the Idiap research institute and the University of Zurich (UZH). The candidate can be registered at the UZH or the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) pending admission to a doctoral school.

The expected start date is between 1 June and 1 Sep 2024.

For more information, please contact lonneke.vanderplas@idiap.ch. Applications are to be made at https://www.idiap.ch/en/join-us/job-opportunities. Please submit your application by March 10 to ensure full consideration.

SOUGHT PROFILE: You should hold, or expect to obtain before the start of your appointment, a Master’s degree (or equivalent) with a background in computational linguistics, evolutionary anthropology, computer science, communication systems, mathematics, and/or related fields. The ideal candidate combines an interest and expertise both in computational linguistics and evolutionary biology, but because this is a very rare profile, we are also strongly encouraging applications from candidates with expertise in one and interest in the other field. Either way, you should have a strong interest in pursuing fundamental research on language evolution. You should be proficient in spoken and written English. Proficiency in or willingness to learn additional languages is a plus.

The candidate will be located at Idiap, in the Computation, Cognition, and Language Group under the supervision of  Prof. Lonneke van der Plas (natural language processing) at Idiap, pending budgetary approval. They will be co-supervised by Prof. Andrea Migliano (evolutionary anthropology) at UZH, and Prof. Lena Jäger (computational linguistics) at UZH. (Virtual) participation in lab meetings both at Idiap and UZH is expected. Furthermore, some fieldwork in Congo or Australia is to be expected.

We take gender balance and diversity seriously in our hiring decisions.

Best, Lonneke