The Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) is looking to fill one postdoc position in Language and Computation within the project EXPRESS: From the Expression of Disagreement to New Foundations for Expressivist Semantics.

You will work within the subproject The Emergence of Negation and Epistemic Modality. The overall goal of this subproject is to test using computational techniques the hypotheses for the raison d’être of negation and epistemic modals developed in the New Foundations for Expressivist Semantics subproject. An additional phase of the Emergence of Negation and Epistemic Modality subproject applies the logical framework developed in the Logic of Rejection subproject to improve on extant computational models for the automatic detection of agreement and disagreement. You will work under the supervision of the PI, Luca Incurvati and will collaborate with him and the other team members.

Your work will involve the use of computational techniques, in particular in the form of computer simulation testing hypotheses about the emergence of certain linguistic expressions, and computational dialogue modelling. You have a PhD in computational linguistics or computer science with a strong focus on language, or another related field. Demonstrable expertise in computer simulation and computational modelling of dialogue will be an advantage.

You will be expected to:

• carry out research in language and computation, with motivation and applications in philosophy, logic and linguistics;

• have regular meetings with the supervisor and take part in all of the project’s activities, including research visits abroad;

• complete at least six research articles (singly authored or co-authored with the PI or other team members), to be published in excellent peer-reviewed journals of computational linguistics, philosophy, or logic;

• collaborate with the other project team members;

• present intermediate research results (obtained individually or in cooperation with other team members) at international workshops and conferences for linguistic, logic and philosophical audiences;

• help out with organizational tasks connected to the project, such as the organization of conferences and workshops and the editing of a collected volume (the list is non-exhaustive);

• help out with the dissemination of the project results to non-specialists through, e.g., public lectures and social media.

All postdoctoral researchers embedded within the ILLC are expected, as part of their professional development, to gain teaching experience.

You should:

• have a PhD degree in computational linguistics or computer science with a strong focus on language, or another related field;

• have an excellent record of publication in top journals;

• have a strong motivation to undertake excellent academic research;

• be able and willing to work in a team and in an interdisciplinary setting;

• have an excellent command of English.

You will be appointed full-time (38 hours per week), starting between 1 February and 31 March 2019. You will be based at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Amsterdam and your research will be carried out within the ILLC. The appointment is initially for a period of 12 months; contingent on satisfactory performance, it will be extended for up to a further two years, for a total maximum of up to three years. The gross monthly salary (on a full-time basis) will range from €3,303 to €3,916 in accordance with the Collective Labour Agreement for Dutch Universities. The salary will be supplemented with an 8% holiday allowance and an 8.3% end-of-year bonus.

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.

http://www.uva.nl/en/home

Institute for Logic, Language and Computation

The Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) is a renowned research institute at the University of Amsterdam, in which researchers from the Faculty of Humanities and the Faculty of Science collaborate. The research carried out at Humanities forms one of the six research schools within this faculty. The ILLC’s central research area is the study of fundamental principles of encoding, transmission and comprehension of information. Research at the institute is interdisciplinary and brings together insights from various disciplines concerned with information and information processing, such as logic, philosophy, linguistics, musicology, mathematics, computer science, artificial intelligence and cognitive science.

We are looking to fill one postdoc position in Language and Computation within the project EXPRESS: From the Expression of Disagreement to New Foundations for Expressivist Semantics. Express is a five-year project funded by a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant and led by Dr Luca Incurvati (Principal Investigator). The project aims to develop a novel theory and logic of the way disagreement is expressed in dialogue. This theory will then be used to establish a novel approach to natural language semantics, inferential expressivism.

The project is highly interdisciplinary and makes use of theoretical and empirical insights from philosophy and linguistics as well as formal techniques from logic and computer science. In addition to the PI and the language and computation postdoc, the research team includes a PhD student in philosophy of language and semantics, a postdoc in logic, and a research assistant. Many members of the ILLC have expertise and interests in the theoretical and empirical topics directly relevant to the project (e.g. Maria Aloni, Floris Roelofsen, Raquel Fernandez, Robert van Rooij, Frank Veltman). The project avails itself of an extensive international network of experts in its remit areas and is overseen by an Advisory Board consisting of scholars from Europe and the US.

http://www.illc.uva.nl/