Are you an enthusiastic research assistant with an interest in supporting science surrounding the neural processes behind human language? And would you like to develop and integrate novel automated methodologies for characterizing content and manner of multimodal communicative behaviours? Then we are looking for you!

As a research assistant you help us write codes for extracting several automated measures from a natural interaction based on written transcripts, Kinect movement data, audio, and video materials. We have collected a large corpus of task-based interactions between participants (n = 71 pairs, about 1 hour per pair). Given the large size of this corpus, we aim to analyse these interactional data in an automated manner as much as possible. Together with Dr Sara Bögels, the coordinator of the project, and various other team members of the Communicative Alignment in Brain and Behaviour (CABB or BQ3) team, you will help write codes for such automated analyses of the interactions.

Your own interests and skills may partly determine the exact projects carried out. Projects may include (but are not limited to):

• Improvement of an already existing system for automated detection and analysis (comparison) of gestures based on Kinect movement data.
• Improvement and unification of scattered codebases for visualising conversational structure, annotation content, and speech signals.
• Automatic extraction of alignment (degree of similarity) between interlocutors from transcripts and/or audio/video, on several different levels:
  • Lexical: similarity of words/lemmas
  • Semantic: similarity of word semantics (e.g. based on word2vec models)
  • Syntactic: similarity of used syntactic structures (e.g. based on N-grams)
  • Prosodic: similarity of speech rate and/or intonation alignment patterns
  • Phonetic: similarity of phonetic realisation of different sounds (using forced phonetic alignment of sound based on the transcripts)

• You hold a Master's degree in a relevant discipline, such as artificial intelligence or computer science.
• You have experience in programming in at least Python or R (Matlab or other languages would be an advantage).
• An interest in language, linguistics and/or multi-modal analyses is desirable.
• You have a good command of English and Dutch.
• You have excellent social skills, a pro-active attitude and team spirit.

Fixed-term contract: It concerns a temporary employment for 1 year.

• It concerns an employment for 0.5 FTE.
• The gross monthly salary amounts to a minimum of €2,471 and a maximum of €3,336 based on a 38-hour working week, depending on previous education and number of years of relevant work experience (salary scale 7).
• You will receive 8% holiday allowance and 8.3% end-of-year bonus.
• It concerns a temporary employment for 1 year.
• You will be able to use our Dual Career and Family Care Services. Our Dual Career and Family Care Officer can assist you with family-related support, help your partner or spouse prepare for the local labour market, provide customized support in their search for employment and help your family settle in Nijmegen.
• Working for us means getting extra days off. In case of full-time employment, you can choose between 29 or 41 days of annual leave instead of the legally allotted 20.

Work and science require good employment practices. This is reflected in Radboud University's primary and secondary employment conditions. You can make arrangements for the best possible work-life balance with flexible working hours, various leave arrangements and working from home. You are also able to compose part of your employment conditions yourself, for example, exchange income for extra leave days and receive a reimbursement for your sports subscription. And of course, we offer a good pension plan. You are given plenty of room and responsibility to develop your talents and realise your ambitions. Therefore, we provide various training and development schemes.

The Netherlands has an outstanding track record in the language sciences. The Language in Interaction research consortium, which is sponsored by a large grant from the Dutch Research Council (NWO), brings together many of the excellent research groups in the Netherlands with a research programme on the foundations of language. In addition to excellence in the domain of language and related relevant fields of cognition, our consortium provides state-of-the-art research facilities and a research team with ample experience in the complex research methods that will be invoked to address the scientific questions at the highest level of methodological sophistication. These include methods from genetics, neuroimaging, computational modelling, and patient-related research. This consortium realises both quality and critical mass for studying human language at a scale not easily found anywhere else.

We have identified five Big Questions (BQ) that are central to our understanding of the human language faculty. These questions are interrelated at multiple levels. Teams of researchers will collaborate to collectively address these key questions of our field.
Our five Big Questions are:
BQ1: The nature of the mental lexicon: How to bridge neurobiology and psycholinguistic theory by computational modelling?
BQ2: What are the characteristics and consequences of internal brain organisation for language?
BQ3: Creating a shared cognitive space: How is language grounded in and shaped by communicative settings of interacting people?
BQ4: Variability in language processing and in language learning: Why does the ability to learn language change with age? How can we characterise and map individual language skills in relation to the population distribution?
BQ5: How are other cognitive systems shaped by the presence of a language system in humans?

You will be appointed at the Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging (DCCN) in Nijmegen and will become a member of our Big Question 3 (CABB) team. The mission of DCCN is to conduct cutting-edge research in cognitive neuroscience. Much of the rapid progress in this field is being driven by the development of complex neuroimaging techniques for the in-vivo scanning of activity in the human brain - an area in which the Centre plays a leading role. The research is conducted in an international setting at all participating institutions. English is the lingua franca.

Radboud University
We want to get the best out of science, others and ourselves. Why? Because this is what the world around us desperately needs. Leading research and education make an indispensable contribution to a healthy, free world with equal opportunities for all. This is what unites the more than 24,000 students and 5,600 employees at Radboud University. And this requires even more talent, collaboration and lifelong learning. You have a part to play!