Post Doctoral Researcher

Maynooth University are seeking to recruit a postdoctoral researcher (or research associate with exceptionally, equivalent research experience) to join a project funded by Science Foundation Ireland to investigate the relationship between language models and people’s attitudes. The project is run jointly by Dr. Dermot Lynott (Department of Psychology) and Dr. Diarmuid O’Donoghue (Department of Computer Science).

The project involves interdisciplinary research drawing on areas of machine learning, corpus linguistics, experimental psychology, social cognition, and cognitive modelling, in order to examine how language experience may be related to the formation and development of people’s attitudes (e.g., such as those relating to age, race, gender, etc.).

For this post, the researcher will use large language models (e.g., Word2vec, GloVe, BERT etc.) to evaluate how well such models can capture human behaviour (using existing and new behavioural data). The researcher will work as part of the project team (alongside a PhD student, also to be appointed) contributing to the design of behavioural studies to test model predictions. Finally, the researcher will work on combining state-of-the art modelling work, with behavioural findings, to develop digital tools to aid researchers, authors and citizens in identifying and understanding implicit bias in language. The researcher will also have the opportunity for collaborating with our partners (TextureAI), including the possibility of short research placements.

The successful candidate will be required to train, test, and evaluate computational models (comparing their performance against human behaviour), develop online tools, contribute to the design of online empirical studies, carry out data analysis, collaborate with other members of the research team, and contribute to conference dissemination and writing papers for publication.

The researcher will be based in the Department of Psychology, and located with other postgraduate researchers and staff working on externally funded research projects.

Salary Scale : €42,033 – €44,572 p.a. (3 points)

Appointments will be made in accordance with public sector pay provisions.

Closing Date: 23:30hrs (local Irish time) on Sunday, 16th April 2023

Please note all applications must be made via our Online Recruitment Portal at the following link: https://www.maynoothuniversity.ie/human-resources/vacancies Applications must be submitted by the closing date and time specified above.

Any applications which are still in progress at the closing time on the specified closing date will be cancelled automatically by the system.

Late applications will not be accepted.

Maynooth University is an equal opportunities employer 

The position is subject to the Statutes of the University