A Researcher in the field of NLP in the Political Domain

Digital Society (DigiS) is a research center of Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK) formed by a multidisciplinary team of more than 100 researchers, technologists and managers (including PhD students) organized in 7 research units dedicated to specific research areas in the ICT domain and 2 support units focusing on project management and technology maturation.
Our mission is to perform advanced research and develop innovative digital technology to address the future digital society’s key challenges. Digital technology has a pervasive impact on our lives and is reshaping our society. The challenge is to ensure that digital technology becomes a stepping stone to create a more sustainable, inclusive, and secure society. More information is available at https://digis.fbk.eu/index.html 

FBK is opening a new position in the Digital Humanities (DH) Research Unit. The Digital Humanities Research Unit investigates methods and systems aimed at applying natural language processing to humanities and social sciences problems. The main objective of DH Research Unit is the extraction and analysis of textual information from non-standard multilingual data to address societal issues. We work with historical archives, social media data, domain-specific and non standard language. 

FBK actively seeks diversity and inclusion in the workplace and is also committed to promoting gender equality. To promote the inclusion of disabled staff as per law 68/99, the Foundation is available and interested in evaluating the applications received for technical-scientific domains that do not correspond exactly to this call.
 

Job Description

The Digital Humanities Research Unit (DH) is looking for a Junior Researcher in the field of NLP applied to political discourse. The candidate will work at the TWIN4DEM Horizon Europe project, whose goal is to strengthen democratic resilience through digital methods. 

Main Tasks:

The candidate will contribute in:

• creation of multilingual corpora in the political domain from legal, parliamentary and social media sources in collaboration with TWIN4DEM partners;
• implementation of NLP tools to analyse the above corpora, and specifically to identify topics, stance, reactions and other relevant aspects connected to democratic debate.  

The candidate is also expected to travel to meetings, publish scientific papers and write project-related documentation, and more in general to carry out the tasks necessary to a successful European project.

The ideal candidate should have:

• Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computational Linguistics, Software Engineering, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence or similar;
• Knowledge of how to run machine learning experiments, from design to evaluation;
• Good programming skills (preferably Python) and knowledge of how to use LLMs for generation and classification tasks;
• Self-motivation and result orientation;
• Good communication and relational skills;
• Flexibility, adaptability, ability to work independently;
• Oral and written proficiency in English.

The following elements will be positively evaluated:

• Experience with working in research teams;
• Experience with European projects or similar;
• Knowledge of one or more additional languages beside English among Italian, Czech, Dutch, French and Hungarian.

Employment:

Type of contract: fixed-term contract
Work time: full time (38 h  per week)
Gross annual salary: about € 36.250
Start date: February 2025
Duration: 24 months
Work Place: Povo, Trento (Italy).
Benefits: flexi-time, company subsidized cafeteria or meal vouchers, internal car park, welcome office support for visa formalities, accommodation, social security (SANIFONDS), family-work balance, free training courses, support on bank account opening, discount on public transport, sport, language course fees. More info at https://www.fbk.eu/en/work-with-us/

Application:

Interested candidates are requested to submit their application by completing the online form (https://jobs.fbk.eu/). Please make sure that your application contains the following attachments (in pdf format):

• full CV (including statement of research interest and the name of two referees);
• Motivation letter.

Application deadline: 02/12/2024

Please read our Recruitment Regulations before completing your application.
For further information or technical issues regarding the application, please contact the Human Resources Services at jobs@fbk.eu.