Senior Research Associate/Research Associate in Natural Language Processing (A1897)

Applications are invited for a Research Associate or Senior Research Associate position in Natural Language Processing (NLP) as part of an interdisciplinary team working on new methods for detecting native language influence. This is a full-time position until November 2018 (current project end date) associated with the UCREL research centre (one of the world's leading centres in corpus-based natural language processing), and Security Lancaster (an Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Research).

You will join the Government funded Native Language Influence Detection (NLID) project. The project is in collaboration with the Centre for Forensic Linguistics at Aston University, and the Linguistics department at Lancaster University. The aim of the project is to research methods and develop software for the task of detecting the influence of other languages on online English. The main task for the post holder will be to research and develop methods for extracting linguistic features defined and described by forensic and corpus linguistic experts, and also the development of the framework and user interface supporting and utilising these features.

The post requires strong software development skills; building using existing components, testing and evaluating code, and meeting end-user requirements. You must also have experience applying NLP and machine learning techniques. You will be expected to contribute to reports, publications and presentations arising from the project work, working collaboratively with internal team members and external partners. Previous experience working on collaborative research projects is an advantage, as well as experience of working in project related fields of cyber security, forensic linguistics and/or corpus linguistics.

UCREL, Security Lancaster, and the School of Computing and Communications (where you will be based) all offer a highly interdisciplinary and stimulating environment for development of a research career. The expectation is that you will be able to actively contribute to the strong profile and interdisciplinary ethos of each through the project, and dissemination activities such as publication of research results.

Informal enquiries may be made to Dr Alistair Baron: a.baron@lancaster.ac.uk

We welcome applications from people in all diversity groups.

Closing Date: 07 Aug 2017
Category: Research