Context And Mission
The Computational Social Science and Humanities program envisions preparing the social sciences and humanities for the era of data, artificial intelligence (AI), and Exascale supercomputing. Our mission is to foster collaboration between social scientists and computer scientists, making high-performance computing (HPC) accessible to all researchers in the field. Through innovative approaches, we aim to apply social science and humanities research to contribute valuable insights for informed policy making. In our pursuit, we focus on a wide range of key societal research areas such as Equity and Welfare, Education, Social Services and Labor Market, Public Opinion and Political Communication in (Social) Media, Social-Ecology, Science and Technology Studies, Archived History, Archeology and Cultural Heritage. Employing a mixed of advanced AI/ML models, including Large Language Models (LLMs), Agent-Based Modeling (ABM), and Social Network Analysis (SNA), we use high-performance computational methods to a wide range of large datasets, such as official statistics, surveys, social media, web-tracking data, news, laws, bibliometric data, historical archives, current data archives, archaeology data, citizen volunteered data, and public administration and industry data.
We are seeking an enthusiastic and rigorous researcher to work at the intersection of computational linguistics, natural language processing, literature and historical linguistics. The successful candidate will be part of the Computational Humanities group and contribute to two projects, focusing on (1) quantitative analysis of linguistic style across five centuries of literary data and (2) evaluation and adaptation of language models for Medieval texts.
Key Duties
Adapt and fine-tune Large Language Models (LLMs) for low-resource languages or domains for downstream NLP tasks. Develop and implement innovative computational metrics to quantify stylistic innovation and deviation from linguistic norms over time. Apply diachronic NLP methods to identify pivot points in literary history and track the evolution of style. Establish evaluation frameworks to measure model performance against historical language benchmarks. Publish findings in top-tier NLP, Computational Linguistics or Computational Humanities conferences or journals (ACL, EMNLP, Coling, CHR). Contribute to the public release of datasets, models, and well-documented and reproducible code, following the FAIR principles.
Requirements
Education PhD in Computational Linguistics, NLP, Computational Humanities, Computer Science or a related field. Essential Knowledge and Professional Experience Demonstrated research track record, including peer-reviewed publications and participation in international research collaborations. Expert proficiency in Python, including deep learning and data science libraries. Experience fine-tuning LLMs and adapting and evaluating models for low-resource languages or domains. Familiarity with the challenges of historical data, interest for NLP applied to the humanities. Knowledge of reproducible research practices, version control systems (Git), and open science workflows. Fluency in spoken and written English. Competences Strong critical thinking skills and analytical rigor, attention to detail. Excellent communication skills for effective collaboration with other researchers as well as research engineers and data scientists. Ability to work independently and within an interdisciplinary team.
Conditions
The position will be located at BSC within the Directors Department We offer a full-time contract (35h/week), a good working environment, a highly stimulating environment with state-of-the-art infrastructure, flexible working hours, extensive training plan, restaurant tickets, private health insurance, support to the relocation procedures Duration: Open-ended contract due to technical and scientific activities linked to the project and budget duration Holidays: 22 days of holidays + 6 personal days + 24th and 31st of December per our collective agreement Salary: we offer a competitive salary commensurate with the qualifications and experience of the candidate and according to the cost of living in Barcelona Starting date: Asap
