IT Specialist: Specialisation Natural Language Processing

West University of Timisoara, Romania, announces the competition for a vacant position of Specialist IT: Specialisation Natural Language Processing within the research project Discipline-specific expert academic writing in Romanian and English: corpus-based contrastive analysis models – DACRE, project code PN-III-P4-ID-PCE-2020-0821, project director: Dr. habil. Madalina CHITEZ. The selected candidate will be employed with a fixed-term part-time employment contract, in compliance with the financing contract.

Your duties

• Carrying out theoretical linguistics research activities in order to meet the project objectives: provides assistance to the PI / Project Director in designing, developing and defining conceptual models and theories in order to contribute to the advancement of the research areas represented by the research project;
• Carrying out applied linguistics research activities, specific to the topics represented by the research project, in order to meet the project objectives: provides assistance to the PI / Project Director in conducting case studies and analyses, developing and testing new research methodologies; identification and exemplification of implementation solutions for the methodologies developed within the project;
• Assistance in creating, processing and maintaining the database that will support the text corpus of the DACRE project (web scraping, POS tagging);
• Modelling corpus data with TEI/XML;
• Participation in the dissemination of research results (presentations at conferences, symposia, etc.);

Your profile

• Master’s degree (in progress or completed) in Philology or IT Studies;
• Experience working with studies, projects and research activities involving the use of NLP (natural language processing) methods for creating, processing, annotating written corpora;
• Experience in web data retrieval processes (web scraping / crawling);
• Solid knowledge of English (level B2-C1)
• Desirable: currently enrolled or completed Doctoral Studies in Philology (Romanian or English Language) or Information Technology;
• Desirable: good knowledge of the Romanian language (language level certificate should be provided);
• Advantage: Experience in research projects and publications / research abroad (with a focus on: corpus linguistics);
• Interest in conducting studies and publications on language topics (with a focus on: corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, academic writing, digital tools in the humanities);
• Willingness to provide support to the DACRE team in various project-related activities (e.g. writing new project applications, organization of scientific events), all carried out on site at the West University of Timișoara;