The Human Computer Interaction unit (HCI) within the department of Computer Science at KU Leuven welcomes applications for a postdoc position in Natural Language Processing. We are seeking an international postdoc: someone who has not been working in Belgium for the last 3 years and is willing to move here.
The HCI unit focuses on how people interact with information, relying on language technology (including text and multimedia mining), visualisation and computer graphics.
Within HCI, the NLP group focuses on multilingual NLP and interpretability.
Group link: https://hci.cs.kuleuven.be/
This project will also involve collaboration with the group of Lisa Beinborn (https://beinborn.eu/) at the University of Göttingen.
Website unit
Responsibilities
The Unit of Representation in Multilingual Language Modelling:
Language technology is increasingly becoming a part of our daily lives. Yet, its access remains vastly unequal for the different languages of the world. This is because the field of NLP has historically been operating with a strong bias towards work that primarily focuses on English. While increasing efforts are being made towards making language technology more multilingual, English remains the language on which NLP technology is developed first, and applied to other languages next, which inevitably leads to degraded performance compared to English. A fundamental modelling choice is the tokenizer which determines the central units of representation for language processing. While fundamental, it is highly under-researched, especially in a multilingual context. In this project, we plan to systematically compare different choices for the representational unit based on characters, bytes, pixels, and phonemes for multilingual language models applied to typologically diverse languages. We will first examine the interaction between this choice and typological characteristics of languages. This will then allow us to develop new approaches for typologically-informed multilingual modelling that are more adaptable to new languages. Ultimately, this will increase cross-lingual fairness.
Profile
• The candidate must have a PhD degree in Computer Science or Artificial Intelligence with a focus on NLP completed at the earliest in 2020, or be expected to complete it before the starting date.
• The candidate cannot have worked in - or have been affiliated with – a Belgian institution in the last 3 years (the funding is part of a mobility grant.)
• The candidate has a track record of publications, ideally including top-tier publications such as ACL and related venues, ICLR, etc.
• The candidate is expected to have good programming skills in python and be familiar with pytorch.
• The candidate must be proficient in oral and written English.
• The candidate must be willing to work independently as well as in a team. They will work on research projects that involve frequent interactions with both internal and external researchers.
Offer
• A high-level and exciting international research environment
• The opportunity to build up research and innovation skills that are essential for a future career in research and development, both in an industrial and academic context
• A competitive salary (see working conditions → salary below) and travel funding
As a postdoc in the Department of Computer Science, you will get involved in teaching (typically labs) for bachelor or master-level courses, master thesis supervision and grading, as well as other small duties (such as helping out with small events) which are shared and distributed among all academic staff of the department. These duties will not exceed 20% of your working time. All applications submitted before the 6th of June will be given full consideration. The starting date will be agreed upon between candidate and supervisor, but the aim is to start as soon as possible.
Within the project there is a possibility for a max. of 3 years funding in this position.
Interested?
For more information please contact Prof. dr. Miryam de Lhoneux, tel.: +32 16 32 82 76, mail: [email protected].
Your application should include
• a detailed CV,
• a letter of motivation with reference to your interest in multilingual NLP, tokenization and tokenless variants.
• links to your 3 publications most relevant to the job
KU Leuven strives for an inclusive, respectful and socially safe environment. We embrace diversity among individuals and groups as an asset. Open dialogue and differences in perspective are essential for an ambitious research and educational environment. In our commitment to equal opportunity, we recognize the consequences of historical inequalities. We do not accept any form of discrimination based on, but not limited to, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, age, ethnic or national background, skin colour, religious and philosophical diversity, neurodivergence, employment disability, health, or socioeconomic status. For questions about accessibility or support offered, we are happy to assist you at this email address.
