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Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Language Technology

Deadline: 27.09.2020

Universitetet i Oslo

The University of Oslo is Norway’s oldest and highest rated institution of research and education with 28 000 students and 7000 employees. Its broad range of academic disciplines and internationally esteemed research communities make UiO an important contributor to society.


The Department of Informatics (IFI) is one of nine departments belonging to the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences. IFI is Norway’s largest university department for general education and research in Computer Science and related topics.


The Department has more than 1800 students on bachelor level, 600 master students, and over 240 PhDs and postdocs. The overall staff of the Department is close to 370 employees, about 280 of these in full time positions. The full time tenured academic staff is 75, mostly Full/Associate Professors..

About the position

Position as postdoctoral research fellow available in the Language Technology Group (LTG) of the Department of Informatics (IFI).

The fellowship period is 4 years. 25% of the position will be dedicated to teaching activities. Starting date no later than 01.01.2021.No one can be appointed for more than one Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the University of Oslo.

Job description / Project description / Development plan:

We seek a highly motivated researcher with a strong track record in NLP. The ideal candidate should be able to demonstrate broad knowledge of neural architectures as applied to core NLP tasks. The position presupposes a PhD degree or equivalent in Natural Language Processing, or in Computer Science with a clearly NLP-based thesis.

The successful candidate will be invited to participate in the definition of the scientific profile for this position, jointly with one or more post-doctoral 'supervisors' from the LTG permanent staff. The project will be expected to both be compatible with and complement current research at LTG, preferably creating points of contact with others in the group. Current prominent research activities at LTG include sentiment analysis (for Norwegian and English), detection and analysis of negation and hedges (for English and Norwegian), parsing into graph-structured representation of meaning, multi-lingual probing of linguistic knowledge in neural architectures, and in techniques for model adaptation to low-resource domains and languages.

A one-year equivalent of the position will be dedicated to teaching and related activities. The language technology group is responsible for several MSc- and BSc-level classes on various aspects of natural language processing, machine learning and programming. Teaching experience and pedagogical skills will be given weight in the evaluation, in particular of machine learning approaches to NLP.

For more information about the Language Technology Group (LTG) at IFI.

Postdoctoral fellows who are appointed for a period of four years are expected to acquire basic pedagogical competency in the course of their fellowship period within the duty component of 25 %.

The main purpose of a postdoctoral fellowship is to provide the candidates with enhanced skills to pursue a scientific top position within or beyond academia. To promote a strategic career path, all postdoctoral research fellows are required to submit a professional development plan no later than one month after commencement of the postdoctoral period.

Qualification requirements

The Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences has a strategic ambition is to be among Europe’s leading communities for research, education and innovation. Candidates for these fellowships will be selected in accordance with this, and expected to be in the upper segment of their class with respect to academic credentials.

  • The candidate must have a PhD or other corresponding education equivalent to a Norwegian doctoral degree in Natural Language Processing. Doctoral dissertation must be submitted for evaluation by the closing date. Only applicants with an approved doctoral thesis and public defence are eligible for appointment.
  • The successful candidate has comprehensive knowledge of contemporary neural techniques and architectures in NLP, including for example (contextualized) embeddings, convolutional and recurrent networks, neural language modeling, and transfer and multi-task learning. Both a theoretical understanding of these approaches and practical experience (for example using frameworks like Keras, DyNet, PyTorch, or TensorFlow) are desirable.
  • Fluent oral and written communication skills in English
  • Desire to perform high-quality research
  • Eagerness to learn
  • Interest and ability to work in an international research team

We offer

  • Salary NOK 523 200 – 605 500 per year depending on qualifications in position as Postdoctoral Research Fellowship (position code 1352)
  • Attractive welfare benefits and a generous pension agreement
  • Professionally stimulating working environment
  • Vibrant international academic environment
  • Postdoctoral development programmes
  • Oslo’s family-friendly surroundings with their rich opportunities for culture and outdoor activities

How to apply

The application must include:

  • Application letter
  • Statement of research purpose
  • CV (summarizing education, positions, pedagogical experience, administrative experience and other qualifying activity)
  • Copies of educational certificates, transcript of records and letters of recommendation
  • A complete list of publications and up to 5 academic works that the applicant wishes to be considered by the evaluation committee
  • Names and contact details of 2-3 references (name, relation to candidate, e-mail and telephone number)

The application with attachments must be delivered in our electronic recruiting system. Foreign applicants are advised to attach an explanation of their University's grading system. Please note that all documents should be in English (or a Scandinavian language).

Interviews with the best qualified candidates will be arranged.

It is expected that the successful candidate will be able to complete the project in the course of the period of employment.

Formal regulations

Please see the guidelines and regulations for appointments to Postdoctoral fellowships at the University of Oslo.

No one can be appointed for more than one Postdoctoral Fellow period at the University of Oslo.

According to the Norwegian Freedom of Information Act (Offentleglova) information about the applicant may be included in the public applicant list, also in cases where the applicant has requested non-disclosure.

The University of Oslo has an agreement for all employees, aiming to secure rights to research results etc.

The University of Oslo aims to achieve a balanced gender composition in the workforce and to recruit people with ethnic minority backgrounds.

Contact information

  • Professor Lilja Øvrelid, e-mail: liljao@ifi.uio.no

For technical questions regarding the recruitment system, please contact HR Adviser Torunn Standal Guttormsen, e-mail: t.s.guttormsen@mn.uio.no

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