Research Assistant/Fellow- Out of Our Minds Project - Department of Modern Languages

Position Details

Department of Modern Languages, College of Arts and Law

Location: University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham UK

Full Time

Fixed term from January 2021 to 31 December 2021 (12 months)

Grade 6

Staring salary between £27,511 and £30,046

Closing date - November 13, 2020

Background

The College of Arts & Law is seeking to appoint an Applied Natural Language Processing (NLP) Specialist, with experience in using Machine Learning (ML) techniques. The successful applicant will run computational simulations of real-life language learning problems, using existing algorithms, and focus on the cognitive plausibility of the linguistic input and output. The aim of these simulations is the generate, in collaboration with a linguist on the team, novel teaching materials for use in classroom intervention studies.

The project is led by Prof Dagmar Divjak in collaboration with Dr Petar Milin. More information about the project is available on outofourminds.bham.ac.uk.

Summary of Role

• Work within the Out of Our Minds team to prepare their findings for testing and use in classroom settings
• Lead on the NLP/ML side of the application, and apply ideas to both real data (e.g., language corpora) and idealized language learning problems (e.g., artificial language designs)
• Analyse and interpret the findings of the NLP/ML applications and prepare technical reports, summarizing the obtained results
• Communicate technical reports to the linguists and psychologists on the team with the aim to facilitate the development of new teaching practices and classroom interventions
• Assist the linguist in developing teaching materials on the basis of the computational findings, e.g. by retrieving examples from the data

Main Duties / Responsibilities

• NLP: prepare raw corpora for computational modelling using existing tools for annotation, tagging, lemmatization etc.
• Run computational models (i.e. simulations) of language processing using a range of machine learning and cognitive modelling techniques
• Actively contribute to the interpretation of the results of the computational simulations and (advanced) statistical analyses.
• In collaboration with a linguist, prepare the output in a way that can be used as classroom teaching materials.
• Record, analyse, and write up the results of the technical work, maintaining a permanent record of the applied machine learning and cognitive modelling techniques.
• Apply version control essential for data preparation, curation and open access archiving.
• If needed, assist with a range of research software engineering tasks, such as optimization, parallelization, use of GPUs, scaling-up etc.
• Plan own workload within the project timetable to ensure that the overall project milestones and objectives are met, and highlight any problems in advance.
• Contribute to the overall activities of the research team.
• Carry out clerical duties relating to the organization of the project as required.
• Any other duties, commensurate with the grade of the post as assigned by the line manager or their nominee.

Person Specification

Essential (unless otherwise specified)

Qualifications & Experience

• Have an MSc or MRes or PhD in Computer Science or Computational Linguistics
• Have advanced programming expertise, particularly in Python (experience with Pandas is desirable) R and Matlab
• Have computational modelling (simulations) experience involving a range of state-of-the-art techniques and learning algorithms
• Have demonstrable experience in the computational modelling of language learning and language processing
• (Desirable): Have some working experience in a university or industrial research environment, particularly in applying computational modelling, NLP and ML techniques
• Be able to manage duties independently and a track record of delivery results to timescale
• Be able to assess and organise resources, plan and progress work activities
• (Desirable): Have experience of cross-, inter-, or multi-disciplinary research approaches and methods

Communication skills

• Ability to communicate complex technical information clearly to non-specialists
• Excellent interpersonal skills with the ability to liaise effectively with colleagues and external stakeholders

Team working

• Ability to work as an effective member of a team, to support the work of colleagues, aligning the day-to-day work and goals of the team
• Co-ordinate own work with others to meet deadlines and avoid duplication of effort
• Experience of motivating and supporting other team members

Problem solving and decision making

• Experience developing creative approaches to problem solving
• Ability to analyse and solve problems with an appreciation of longer-term implications

Personal effectiveness

• Ability to assess resource requirements and use resources effectively
• Experience of adapting own skills to new circumstances

Informal enquiries should be directed to Professor Dagmar Divjak or Dr Petar Milin at:

ooominds@ooominds.org

Deadline for applications: 13 November 2020

Interviews will be held w/c 23 November 2020.

More information about the Out of our Minds project can be found here:

https://outofourminds.bham.ac.uk

We value diversity at the University of Birmingham and welcome applications from all sections of the community

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