Postdoctoral Position on Estimation and Implications of Invisible Languages on the Internet

University of Amsterdam’s Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR) invites applications for a fully funded Postdoctoral Researcher on our ‘Invisible Languages’ project. The postdoc appointee will assess grassroots and digital prevalence for more than 7000 languages currently spoken by humans across the globe, co-develop community interventions in collaboration with international partners, and develop large language model (LLM) frameworks with a dedicated focus on under-resourced languages.

Postdoc Opportunity: Estimation and Implications of Invisible Languages
The Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR) at the University of Amsterdam invites applications for a fully funded, 20 month 1 FTE Postdoctoral Researcher position (extendable up to 24 months based on teaching experience and interests) on the interdisciplinary “Invisible Languages” initiative. Working together with academic faculty, international non-profits (Public Knowledge Project, Respond Crisis Translation, and Wikimedia Foundation) and local language communities, you will co-develop measures of languages’ grassroots vitality and digital presence that reflect community priorities and lived experiences.

In collaboration with communication scientists, sociolinguists, digital humanists and grassroots partners, you will curate multimodal text and audio corpora, develop participatory research protocols, and translate theoretical frameworks of linguistic justice into practical interventions. You will lead capacity-building workshops, support community-driven documentation efforts, and help create sustainable toolkits and educational resources that amplify under-resourced languages online. Along with methodological versatility and ethical community-engaged research, we are looking for candidates with strong computational skills including proficiency in Python programming, experience with data pipelines, machine learning frameworks and large language models (LLMs), and creation of open-source digital resources.

Applicants must hold a PhD (awarded within the last five years or expect to obtain it soon) in Communication Science, Computational Social Science, Digital Humanities, Computational Linguistics, or a related field, and demonstrate a strong commitment to interdisciplinary, participatory scholarship. Fluency in English is required; additional language skills are a plus.

This full-time appointment runs for 20 months (1 January 2026 to 31 August 2027), with potential extension up to 24 months contingent on teaching contributions in computationally oriented courses at the Department of Communication Science, University of Amsterdam. Please submit your application as a single consolidated PDF (including your cover letter, CV, one relevant published article, and contact details for two academic referees) by 30 September 2025. For further inquiries on this position, you can contact Dr Saurabh Khanna (s.khanna@uva.nl) or Dr Olga Eisele (o.eisele@uva.nl).

What are you going to do
You will:

• Co-design community-driven metrics of language vitality and digital presence
• Curate and expand multimodal text and audio corpora with local partners
• Fine tune open-source large language models and rule-based tools for under-resourced languages
• Develop and maintain scalable pipelines for language data collection and preprocessing
• Lead co-created interventions and workshops to improve digital language presence

What do you have to offer
You have:

• A PhD (awarded within the last five years) in Communication Science, Computational Social Science, Digital Humanities, Computational Linguistics, or a related field
• Demonstrated commitment to ethical, community-engaged AI research focused on low-resource and vulnerable languages
• Expertise in Python programming with hands-on experience in PyTorch or TensorFlow for model development, fine tuning, and rigorous evaluation
• Proven ability to design rule-based natural language processing systems and implement scalable text and audio data pipelines
• Excellent communication, project management, and interdisciplinary collaboration skills
• A strong commitment to open science principles

You are able to:

• Curate and validate bespoke multilingual text corpora alongside key collaborators
• Co-design and optimize natural language processing workflows in partnership with community stakeholders and field linguists
• Fine-tune and benchmark large language models to enhance performance on endangered and under-resourced languages
• Develop robust end-to-end data pipelines, from corpus acquisition and preprocessing to model training and deployment
• Deploy, evaluate, and iterate fair machine translation solutions with global collaborators to improve language visibility and accessibility

What else do we offer you

• A fully funded postdoctoral appointment at ASCoR with a competitive salary and comprehensive benefits
• Dedicated research support and resources to pioneer computational approaches for uncovering and revitalizing invisible languages
• A collaborative, interdisciplinary environment working alongside leading scholars in communication science, computational linguistics, and non-profit partners
• Contribution to academic articles for publication in high-impact scientific journals and presenting them at national/international conferences
• Access to state-of-the-art high-performance computing clusters, cloud infrastructure, and necessary software for large-scale model development and analysis
• Structured mentorship, regular career-development workshops, and grant-writing support to prepare for independent research funding (ERC, NWO) and advance your academic career

You will work here
This project is embedded within the Amsterdam School of Communication Research (ASCoR) at the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, University of Amsterdam. ASCoR brings together experts across four program groups - Persuasive Communication; Corporate Communication; Political Communication & Journalism; and Youth & Media Entertainment - to advance interdisciplinary research on how media and technology shape society.

For this project, you will be officially embedded in the Youth & Media Entertainment (YME) program group. YME focuses on the role of emerging technologies in everyday life, with a special emphasis on how these phenomena affect language use, digital inclusion, and well-being of young populations across the globe. You will collaborate closely with faculty, field linguists, and project partners like the Public Knowledge Project, Wikimedia Foundation, and Respond Crisis Translation to develop computational approaches that bring invisible languages into view.

At ASCoR and within YME, you will join a dynamic, supportive research community that values collaboration, innovation, and real-world impact. Based in Amsterdam – a vibrant international hub – you will engage with stakeholders across academia, industry, and non-profits to tackle the urgent challenges of digital language inequality.

Please submit your completed application as a single consolidated PDF by 30 September 2025. The PDF should include:

• Curriculum vitae
• Letter of motivation (maximum 1 page), explaining your interest and fit to this postdoctoral position, and how you meet our selection criteria
• 2 academic references, contact details for two academic referees familiar with your work (Letters are not required at the time of applying)
• 1 writing sample (preferably a published article) that is illustrative of your abilities and interest in this project

Shortlisted candidates will be invited for interviews, which are expected to take place in late October/early November 2025. For further questions about the vacancy, you can contact: Dr Saurabh Khanna (s.khanna@uva.nl) or Dr Olga Eisele (o.eisele@uva.nl).