"Postdoctoral Position on Estimation and Implications of Invisible Languages on the Internet"

Job Summary: The University of Amsterdam’s Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR) invites applications for a fully funded Postdoctoral Researcher on the 'Invisible Languages' project. This 20-month position (potentially extendable to 24 months) involves assessing grassroots and digital prevalence of over 7000 languages, co-developing community interventions, and developing large language model frameworks for under-resourced languages.

Responsibilities:

• Co-design community-driven metrics of language vitality and digital presence.
• Curate and expand multimodal text and audio corpora with local partners.
• Fine-tune open-source large language models and rule-based tools for under-resourced languages.
• Develop and maintain scalable pipelines for language data collection and preprocessing.
• Lead co-created interventions and workshops to improve digital language presence.

Qualifications and Requirements:

• A PhD awarded within the last five years in Communication Science, Computational Social Science, Digital Humanities, Computational Linguistics, or a related field.
• Demonstrated commitment to ethical, community-engaged AI research focused on low-resource and vulnerable languages.
• Expertise in Python programming with hands-on experience in PyTorch or TensorFlow for model development, fine-tuning, and evaluation.
• Proven ability to design rule-based natural language processing systems and implement scalable text and audio data pipelines.
• Excellent communication, project management, and interdisciplinary collaboration skills.
• Strong commitment to open science principles.
• Ability to curate multilingual text corpora, co-design NLP workflows, fine-tune large language models, develop data pipelines, and deploy fair machine translation solutions.

What the Employer Offers:

• A fully funded postdoctoral appointment with a competitive salary and comprehensive benefits.
• Dedicated research support and resources for computational approaches.
• A collaborative, interdisciplinary environment at ASCoR.
• Opportunities to contribute to academic articles and present at conferences.
• Access to high-performance computing clusters and software.
• Structured mentorship, career-development workshops, and grant-writing support.