Postdoc and PhD position in NLP/CL/CSS at GESIS (Cologne)
The newly established Data Science Methods team led by Gabriella Lapesa [2,3] (Leibnitz Institute for Social Sciences GESIS, Cologne [1], Computational Social Science department [4]) has two positions available from November 2023:
– one postdoctoral researcher (100%, 4 years, with possibility of tenure)
– one doctoral researcher (75%, 4 years). The PhD project will be pursued at the Heinrich Heine University of Düsseldorf (where Gabriella Lapesa is a junior professor in Responsible Data Science and Machine Learning).
** The team **
The Data Science Methods team will contribute to build and mantain the GESIS infrastructure for Computational Social Science (CSS) research by developing novel methods and making them available, documented, and accessible through the GESIS services. The team will focus on fostering the interaction between Natural Language Processing and Social Science by developing solutions that allow for the integration of multiple information sources (e.g., different textual sources for the same debate; socio-demographic features of speakers and audiences; integration of textual and multimodal data) and address recent challenges in NLP (modeling subjective phenomena; low-resource scenarios; identifying and mitigating bias).
The team will tackle research questions at the interface between computational argumentation and CSS, and target political communication from a very broad perspective involving different types of actors (citizens, politicians, parties) and discourse contexts (e.g., online discussions vs. newspapers). From a methodological perspective, at the core of the team’s research agenda will be the “learning from disagreements” challenge, as machine learning approaches which rely on gold standards which average annotators’ perspectives are particularly unsuitable for the highly subjective phenomena tackled in CSS research (e.g., persuasion in online discussions; harmful communication online; polarization).
** How to apply **
The official job announcement with more details about the requirements/tasks and the application procedure can be found at the following links:
Postdoctoral researcher (deadline: September 5th): https://www.hidden-professionals.de//HPv3.Jobs/Gesis//stellenangebot/33073/1
Doctoral researcher (deadline: September 6th): https://www.hidden-professionals.de//HPv3.Jobs/Gesis//stellenangebot/33084/1