Postdoc position in Scaling Up Qualitative Interviews with Large Language M

at  IT University of Copenhagen

The IT University of Copenhagen invites highly motivated candidates to apply for a postdoc position. The earliest possible starting date is 1 May 2025.
The IT University’s vision is to create and share knowledge that is profound and leads to groundbreaking information technology and services for the benefit of humanity. The Computer Science Department seeks to conduct research and education that are both foundational and have an impact on industry and society.

JOB DESCRIPTION

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in social sciences to classify content or as synthetic ‘respondents’, but their greatest potential may lie in eliciting new information from people. This project will develop a novel framework for collecting large-scale interview data, based on the application of cutting-edge LLM techniques in the social science domain.
A priority for the development is to rely on open-source language models, to increase both regulatory compliance and understanding of the benefits and weaknesses of the model. The project will focus on English and Danish. It will be tested in a case study of Danish citizens’ opinions towards the green transition to produce large-scale, in-depth data to inform better data-driven policies.
The ideal candidate will have a solid background in Computational Linguistics/Natural Language Processing, as well as core skills in programming in Python and machine learning. Having prior knowledge in an area relevant to the project is valuable (e.g. social sciences, psychology, qualitative methods). On the NLP side, relevant prior experience could include domain-specific chatbot development, adaptation to low-resource languages, training data development.

The position is funded for 2 years. The postdoc will receive mentorship and support in clarifying their career goals and strengthening their profile in the relevant areas. Besides adding to their portfolio of top-tier publications, the postdoc will build up their international network and collaborative skills and increase their visibility through e.g. organization of an international workshop and/or conference tutorial. For those interested in pursuing an academic career, the following is also possible (but entirely optional):

• gain experience in applying for external funding, with professional support of ITU funding unit
• supervise Master students solo, and/or assist in supervising a PhD student
• undertake a formal teacher training program, including teaching guest lectures in the relevant data science courses at the ITU computer science department

QUALIFICATION REQUIREMENTS

The applicant must hold or be close to completion of, a PhD-degree with research experience in Natural Language Processing with a substantial publication record, for example, publications in top conferences such as *ACL, EMNLP, ICLR, or similar, or in journals of a comparable quality.

Please refer the Job description for details