Postdoctoral Project Researcher - Horizon Europe project IDEAL (Inclusive Democratic Engagement and Language Technologies in Europe)

Description

Postdoctoral position to carry our research and development in the areas of (i) multilingual text simplification for citizens with language comprehension challenges and (ii) multilingual and multicultural machine translation relying on state-of-the-art deep neural models and architectures (LLMs). The work is to be carried out in the context of the Horizon Europe project IDEAL (Inclusive Democratic Engagement and Language Technologies in Europe) which addresses several languages. 

Tasks of project coordination, programming and testing:

1. 1.        Research and development of natural language processing systems. 
2. 2.        Research and development of multilingual machine translation and text simplification systems. 
3. 3.        Development of systems and calibration of text-to-speech systems.
4. 4.        Acquisition of “benchmarks” for multilingual machine translation and text simplification tasks.
5. 5.        Development/calibration of automatic systems for evaluating machine translation and text simplification, among others.
6. 6.        Integration of the libraries developed in specific applications.
7. 7.        These tasks (translation, simplification, etc.) will be developed by adapting existing (and open) pre-trained multilingual LLMS through fine-tuning or prompting, among other techniques.

The work is to be carried out in the context of the Horizon Europe project IDEAL (Inclusive Democratic Engagement and Language Technologies in Europe) which addresses multilingual democratic inclusion The selected candidate will be the main responsible for the technical work in the area of natural language processing, multilingual/multicultural translation, text simplification among others which will be addressed with current LLMs which will be adapted to the given tasks. The candidate will work in collaboration of a team of NLP experts at UPF. The work will also involve the development of libraries, acquisition and preparation of datasets for experimentation, and intrinsic (metric-based) evaluation of the technology. Collaboration with partners in the project will be necessary to ensure success. The candidate will participate in meetings (on-line and face-to-face), writing reports and scientific papers, and other standard activities in Horizon Europe research projects. 

Sub Research Field - Natural Language Processing and related areas. 

Career Stage - Experienced researcher or 4-10 yrs( Post graduate)

Research Profiles - Recognised Researcher (R2) (PhD holders or equivalent who are not yet fully independent)

Benefits - Up to 40.949,88 € gross salary per any. Social security, employment benefits, paternity/maternity leave, and access to the health system are guaranteed by the state. Right to 4-weeks annual leave.

The applicants should have the right to work in the EU. 

Status - Full-Time

Required Education Level - PhD or equivalent

Required Research Experience - Computer Science

Years of Research Experience - 4

Required Languages - English (excellent level)

Additional Requirements:

Knowledge Of English

Desirable knowledge (or experience working with) other languages, especially: French, German, Greek, Arabic or Persian.

Proven experience in research with “Large Language Models (LLMs)” for tasks of classification, generation, translation and simplification of texts

Desirable research experience in research projects

Experience in writing and publishing scientific articles and scientific reports

Experience in software projects

Experience with libraries and language processing models

Immediate availability to start working

Qualifications

Selection Criteria

• Academic and professional training: 0-20 points.
• Research experience (publications, projects, patents, “shared tasks”, etc.): 0-30
• Suitability to the proposed profile (similar projects, experience in European projects, etc.): 0-30 points.
• Other merits (organization of scientific events, international collaboration, seminars, presentations, mentoring activities, etc.): 0-20 points.

The minimum score to pass the selection process is: 80 points

Application Instructions

Through Interfolio

Equal Employment Opportunity Statement

UPF promotes a diverse and inclusive environment and welcomes applicants regardless of age, disability, gender, nationality, race, religion or sexual orientation.