Are you a high potential young researcher with a PhD degree either in Experimental Psychology or Psycholinguistics, with an interest in natural Natural Language interpretation, and would you be interested to join the Logic and Language programme at our institute to investigate the meaning of generic and conditional sentences? If so, we invite you to apply for this position.

This postdoc position is part of the NWO Open Competition project 'From Learning to Meaning: A new approach to Characterizing Sentences and Stereotypes'. You will join the group of Robert van Rooij. The aim of the project is to investigate empirically what is the meaning of generalising expressions like generic and conditional sentences. The methods used are (i) experimental psychology (lab-based and online experiments) and (ii) distributive semantics to find biases in large corpora. The postdoc is expected to work on (i).

What are you going to do?

You will be expected to fulfil the following tasks:

• collaborate with the other researchers working on the project (the PI and a PhD candidate, to be hired at a later date);
• assist with the supervision of PhD candidates and MSc students;
• regularly present research results at international workshops and conferences, and publish them in conference proceedings and journals;
• participate in and contribute to the organisation of research activities and events at the institute, such as workshops and colloquia;

While this is primarily a research position, you will have the opportunity to contribute to teaching activities.

You have:

• a PhD degree in Cognitive Science, Psycholinguistics, or a related discipline;
• a strong background in experimental psychology as witnessed by publications in relevant conference proceedings or journals;
• in-depth knowledge of one of the following areas is a plus:

 1) Bayesian Statistics,
 2) Natural language semantics,
 3) Logic;

• a strong passion for research and the wish to learn new skills through working with or assisting in guiding PhD and MSc students;
• excellent communication skills in English, both oral and written.

Fixed-term contract: One year.

Starting date: as soon as possible.

Your appointment is for a period of 30 months, with an initial one-year probation period. This will be extended for a further 18 months on positive evaluation.

Your full-time gross monthly salary would be between €2,709 and €4,274 gross per month, depending on your experience (salary scale 10). Your annual salary will be supplemented with 8 % holiday allowance and 8.3 % end-of-year bonus.  The Collective Labour Agreement of Dutch Universities applies.

Are you curious about our extensive package of secondary employment benefits? Then find out more about working at the Faculty of Science.

University of Amsterdam

With over 5,000 employees, 30,000 students and a budget of more than 600 million euros, the University of Amsterdam (UvA) is an intellectual hub within the Netherlands. Teaching and research at the UvA are conducted within seven faculties: Humanities, Social and Behavioural Sciences, Economics and Business, Law, Science, Medicine and Dentistry. Housed on four city campuses in or near the heart of Amsterdam, where disciplines come together and interact, the faculties have close links with thousands of researchers and hundreds of institutions at home and abroad.  

The UvA’s students and employees are independent thinkers, competent rebels who dare to question dogmas and aren’t satisfied with easy answers and standard solutions. To work at the UvA is to work in an independent, creative, innovative and international climate characterised by an open atmosphere and a genuine engagement with the city of Amsterdam and society.

Faculty of Science – Institute for Logic, Language and Computation

The Faculty of Science has a student body of around 6,500, as well as 1,600 members of staff working in education, research or support services. Researchers and students at the Faculty of Science are fascinated by every aspect of how the world works, be it elementary particles, the birth of the universe or the functioning of the brain.

The Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) is an interdisciplinary research institute that aims at bringing together insights from various fields concerned with information and information processing, such as computational linguistics, computer science, artificial intelligence, logic, philosophy, mathematics, linguistics, cognitive science and music cognition. Its central research area is the study of fundamental principles of encoding, transmission and comprehension of information. It offers an international research environment with world-class faculty in all of its areas of specialization.