Postdoctoral Researcher in Language Technology
University of Helsinki Department of Digital Humanities
Finland

The Department of Digital Humanities (DDH) at the Faculty of Arts is seeking a

Postdoctoral Researcher in Language Technology

for a two-year contract starting on September 1, 2021 at the latest as part of the ERC project FoTran (Found in Translation). The FoTran project (http://www.helsinki.fi/fotran) focuses on cross-lingual sentence representation learning and multilingual neural machine translation. The goal is to learn highly abstract language-agnostic semantic representations from massively parallel data sets and we emphasize extrinsic evaluations (using various downstream tasks) and intrinsic assessment of the models to understand and interpret neural models and distributed representations. The position opened in this call is meant to further strengthen our work on interpretability and explainability of multilingual neural language and translation models and we are seeking for strong candidates with a background in computational linguistics or related fields.

Language technology has a long tradition in Helsinki with a strong impact on the field of natural language processing world-wide including work on computational morphology, multilingual NLP and machine translation. The LT research group (https://blogs.helsinki.fi/language-technology/) is a growing unit of currently 20+ researchers with strong connections to various fields in digital humanities as well as computer science and AI research. The group is integrated in the newly formed Department of Digital Humanities and also affiliated with the Finnish Center for Artificial Intelligence FCAI. FoTran is a prestigious project funded by the European Research Council with a 5-year consolidator grant led by Prof. Jörg Tiedemann. Our research is supported by an excellent infrastructure with world-class computational resources and in the project we focus on data-driven methods and large-scale experiments with massive and linguistically diverse datasets.

Candidates should hold a doctoral degree in language technology or related fields with an excellent track record in the field of NLP, in particular on neural language modelling. Experience with machine translation and multilingual NLP is a strong advantage for the position we intend to fill. The position is dedicated to research and 100% funded by the project. Other duties such as teaching and supervision tasks can be negotiated but are not required. However, we encourage our team members to be part of the educational activities in our department as well. Note that the work requires to move to Helsinki.

The University of Helsinki is the oldest and largest institution of academic education in Finland, an international scientific community of 40,000 students and researchers. In international university rankings, the University of Helsinki typically ranks among the top 100. The University of Helsinki seeks solutions for global challenges and creates new ways of thinking for the best of humanity. The Department of Digital Humanities is located right in the beautiful center of Helsinki and the contract provides all benefits and social security that are common in Finland. The salary will be based on level 5 of the job requirement scheme for teaching and research staff in the salary system of Finnish universities. In addition, a salary component based on personal performance will be paid. The annual gross income range will be approx. 41.000 – 50.000 depending on the appointee’s qualifications and experience. In addition, occupational healthcare will be provided. The employment contract will include a probationary period of six months.

We welcome applications until May 31, 2021 with the following required attachments:
● Motivation letter including ideas for project-related research work (1-4 pages)
● A curriculum vitae
● List of publications (please mark up to five key publications; copies of the publications are not needed but open access URL’s are very much appreciated)
● The degree certificate of the PhD degree (or documentation of public defence permission)
● Two names of referees who would be available to provide references on demand

Recommendation letter(s) from previous supervisors or employers can optionally also be attached to the application.

Further information: Prof. Jörg Tiedemann (jorg.tiedemann@helsinki.fi)

Please submit your application, together with the required attachments, through the University of Helsinki Recruitment System via the link Apply for job. Applicants who are employees of the University of Helsinki are requested to leave their application via the SAP HR portal.

For information on the university as employer, please see: https://www.helsinki.fi/en/university/working-at-the-university

In case you need assistance with the University’s electronic recruitment system or SAP HR portal, please contact recruitment@helsinki.fi.