Open Positions in the BamNLP Research Lab
Introduction and Overview of the Group
The group will be starting in Bamberg in March, 2024.
We will work on natural language processing across various topics, but focused on psychological concepts like emotions, the intent to deceive, or personality. Therefore, from a natural language processing perspective, we develop systems that perform sentiment and emotion analysis, do personality profiling, fact checking, deception detection, social media analysis and so forth.
Such systems are applied across various areas, including digital humanities, computational psychology, linguistics, or computational social sciences.
To be able to develop such systems successfully, we advance the state of the art in NLP methods, including deep learning, probabilistic models, or prompting.
This constitutes the main research areas of Bamberg NLP:
- Modeling (psychological) concepts
- Develop NLP systems
- Adapt such systems across various fields
- Fundamental NLP research
Most positions in the group touch more than one of these areas, but the focus is different. Please have a look at the projects list and the people that will be part of the group to get a better impression.
Open Research Positions
The application deadline for the positions listed below has passed. We will now review all applications, request reference letters, and then invite for interviews. If you send your application after the deadline has passed, it will only be processed if no fitting candidate could be found..
The following research positions are open, and we invite you to apply. The application deadline is February 28, 2024. We will review applications until the position is filled:
- Postdoc in topics related to the research group, 3 years with the possibility of extension. Details: de, en.
- PhD student in interactive prompt optimization, 3 years. Details: de, en.
- Researcher in event-centered emotion analysis, 1 year. Details: de, en.
- Researcher in multimodal emotion analysis, 1 year. Details: de, en.
Please apply following the explanations in the documents. Please clearly indicate for which position you are applying. Note that positions 3 and 4 could also be filled by the same person sequentially.
Furher note that all these positions can be filled with PhD students or postdocs. The above assignments of career stages to the positions can be handled flexibly. If you intend to apply as a PhD student to position 1 or as a postdoc to position 2, please contact Roman Klinger beforehand. Applications for positions 3+4 are considered for all career levels directly.
Why Bamberg?
Bamberg will soon develop into a great place to do research and educate young researchers in natural language processing. Next to our new group, there is already a dialogue and speech group and an information retrieval group. In addition, there are many general AI areas covered, including XAI, cognitive systems, computer vision, machine learning, and others. The NLP group is part of the computer science department, but will have strong connections to linguistics and humanities, and therefore also keep the computational linguistics aspect of NLP in focus. You can read more about the Bamberg AI center here.
NLP in Bamberg is unique in the sense that it focuses on psychological concepts and the people behind the language generation process. We do work on understanding how language works and what people say. The unique focus is, however, on what language tells us about the people who use it. What is their intent? Do they lie? What personality do they have? If you are interested in such aspects of language technology, our NLP group is a good match for you! If you want to learn more, please have a look at our recent publications.
Further, Bamberg is a beautiful place! Is might look like it’s perhaps a bit small, but it’s a lively city with people on the streets day and night and an active and diverse bar scene. The University has buildings all around the city and students are everywhere. If you want to get more possible events, Nuremburg is just 35 minutes away by train. If that’s not enough, Munich is 1:45h away, and Berlin 2:30h.
Salary
(I am only writing this as rough indicators what to expect, the final decisions are made on the administration level at the University, and I cannot cover all possible cases here. But it should give you a rough idea.)
It’s sometimes a bit difficult to understand what salary to expect from the official job descriptions above. These positions are all 100% full time researcher positions. As a PhD student (position 2, 3, 4) who starts, you can roughly expect 2600 Euro after taxes, health insurance, and social insurance. The exact amount depends a set of factors, including experience, and if you are married or have kids, but that’s an estimate. That’s a good income that allows a comfortable live in Bamberg.
As a project-funded postdoc, it depends more on your experience. Technically, the salary scheme is the same as for the PhD student, but with more prior experience, you are in a higher level. For instance, with 5 years of experience, you could expect around 2900 Euro net income.
Position 1 mentioned above can (but does not need to) also be given to a person in a civil servant situation. Here, you are not “hired” but you are a civil servant for a limited time. This concept is often confusing to people outside of Germany (or even for Germans), but I am happy to help if you have questions. The Wikipedia page might also help. The salary for such Postdoc Position is higher, with at least 3800 Euro net income, but you still need to pay 50% of a health insurance from that (the other half is covered by the state). Still, what you have at the end of the month on your bank account is quite some good income with this situation.
Some tipps on applying
Please read the descriptions how to apply in the documents listed above. In addition, the following might help you to write an application that makes it easy for us to recognize that you are a good fit:
- Make sure to clearly explain why you are a good fit for a position.
- Let us know how you connect yourself with other projects and researchers in the group.
- Explain why you are particularly interested in this position.
- Which previous experiences might be relevant for the project you are applying for, and please explain how.
- Further, please make sure that you share all documents jointly in one pdf file.
- Please make sure that you share all requested information mentioned in the PDF of the call for applications.
If you are unsure about the process to apply, after having read the PDF documents linked to above, please read this and this. If you still have questions, please do not hesitate to ask.
Open Administration Position
In addition to the research positions, we have one position open as a 50% secretary position (20 hours/week, TVL-E6) in the group. You can find details in the following document (in German, because some knowledge of German is required for this position). The application deadline is February 11, 2024. Note that the application does not go directly to me but to the central administration of the University, but please feel free to contact me if you have any questions.
Questions?
If you have any questions, please contact roman.klinger@uni-bamberg.de or contact him on social media.