Academic research assistant in Saarbrücken bei Universität des Saarlandes

Saarland University is a campus university that is internationally recognized for its strong research programmes.

Fostering young academic talent and creating ideal conditions for teaching and research are a core part of the

university’s mission. As part of the University of the Greater Region, Saarland University enables students and staff to

share and exchange knowledge and ideas between disciplines, between universities and across borders. With over

17,000 national and international students, studying more than a hundred different academic disciplines, Saarland

University is a diverse and dynamic learning environment. [Saarland University is officially recognized as one of

Germany’s family-friendly higher-education institutions and with a combined workforce of more than 4,000 it is one

of the largest employers in the region.]

The Department of Language Science and Technology is inviting applications for the following position commencing

02 September 2024

Academic research assistant (m/f/x)
Reference number W2439, Salary in accordance with the rules for the EU-Marie-Curie scheme accounting gross

salary flat, duration of employment: 3 years, volume of employment: 100 % of standard working time.

Workplace/Department:

CASCADE (Computational Analysis of Semantic Change Across Different Environments) is a HORIZON Marie

Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Doctoral Networks scheme which will bring together researchers from a variety

of backgrounds, including literary studies, historical text analysis, semantics, corpus linguistics, machine learning

and natural language processing. The project will emphasise the importance of computational linguistics and

humanities scholarship as skills that bring value and competitive edge to organisations concerned with semantically

aware information retrieval and text analytics. CASCADE is a partnership between University College Cork, the

University of Sheffield, KU Leuven, the University of Helsinki, and Saarland University.

Saarland University is currently seeking applications for a PhD project entitled Modeling context for the analysis

of language variation and change, which will be one of ten funded projects to emerge out of CASCADE’s

doctoral network. The successful candidate will be appointed as Marie Curie Early Career Researchers at Saarland

University, enrolled in a fully-funded three-year PhD programme.

The successful candidate will be supervised by PD Dr. Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb. The position will be located

within the Department of Language Science and Technology. The successful applicant will have the opportunity to

collaborate with researchers affiliated with the DFG-funded Collaborative Research Center (CRC) 1102 on

Information Density and Linguistic Encoding at Saarland University. CRC 1102 is a thriving research environment with

over 30 PhD students and postdocs from many subfields of Linguistics, Computational Linguistics and

Psycholinguistics. The Department of Language Science and Technology consists of about 100 research staff in nine

research groups in the fields of Computational Linguistics, Psycholinguistics, Speech Processing, and Corpus

Linguistics. It is part of Saarland Informatics Campus, which brings together computer science research at the

university with world-class research institutions on campus.

The project Modeling context for the analysis of language variation and change will use computational approaches to

mode linguistic and extra-linguistic context for the analysis of language variation and change. Context has a major

impact on how we process language. However, the notion of context is very broad ranging from broadly conceived

pragmatic conditions, i.e. the extra-linguistic context (e.g. socio-cultural factors, genres, time), to the relationship

among linguistic elements that can substitute for each other in a given context, i.e. the paradigmatic context, up to

the local linguistic context of linguistic elements, i.e. the syntagmatic context. While studies on language variation

and change do encompass the notion of context, the coverage of contextual factors is often relatively limited. This

project will apply and further develop computational modeling techniques to integrate contextual factors among the

types of context described above to arrive at more comprehensive accounts of effects of contextual factors on

language variation and change.

The vacancy is open to applicants of all nationalities who comply with the mobility requirement and the degree