Research Associate in the Department of Informatics

Applications are invited for a Research Associate position on the UKRI-funded Turing AI Fellowship project ‘Event-Centric Framework for Natural Language Understanding’ led by Prof. Yulan He. The project aims to develop a knowledge-aware and event-centric framework for natural language understanding, in which event graphs are built as reading progresses; event representations are learned with the incorporation of background knowledge; implicit knowledge is derived by performing reasoning over event graphs; and the comprehension model is developed with built-in interpretability and robustness against adversarial attacks. 

There will be three research associates appointed in different stages of the project. For this post, the successful candidate will primarily focus on event hypergraph representation learning and knowledge-aware Question-Answering. They will work closely with various industrial partners including AstraZeneca, Google and Actable AI. They will also join the wider network of  

Turing AI fellows

and the  

Alan Turing Institute

, the national AI and Data Science institute in the UK. There will be opportunities to develop research profile, to travel to give demos and presentations, and to write academic papers.

Candidates should hold a PhD degree in Computer Science or other relevant discipline. The successful candidate will possess skills in natural language processing and deep learning. Experience of knowledge graph, graph neural networks and/or Question-Answering would be beneficial.

This post will be offered on a full-time, fixed term contract for 3 years.

The successful candidate is expected to: 

• research, design, implement and test advanced algorithms for natural language processing. 
• evaluate the new algorithms on real-world data. 
• write up research work for publication. 
• translate knowledge of advances in the subject area into research activity. 
• contribute to preparing proposals and applications to external bodies. 
• assist in the supervision of student projects and the development of student research skills. 

The above list of responsibilities may not be exhaustive, and the post holder will be required to undertake such tasks and responsibilities as may reasonably be expected within the scope and grading of the post.  

Essential criteria  

1.        PhD in Natural Language Processing (NLP), Artificial Intelligence or a very closely related discipline. 

2.        Strong research record in NLP as evidenced by publications in high quality journals and conferences. 

3.        Sufficient breadth or depth of specialist knowledge in the discipline and of research methods and techniques to work within established research programmes.  

4.        Good effective communication (both oral and written) skills.  

5.        Ability to write research reports and papers accessible to both academic and lay audiences.  

6.        Good interpersonal skills. 

7.        Ability to initiate, plan, organise, implement and deliver programmes of work to tight deadlines.  

Desirable criteria

1.       Ability or potential to contribute to the development of funding proposals in order to generate external funding to support research projects. 

*Please note that this is a PhD level role but candidates who have submitted their thesis and are awaiting award of their PhDs will be considered. In these circumstances the appointment will be made at Grade 5, spine point 30 with the title of Research Assistant. Upon confirmation of the award of the PhD, the job title will become Research Associate and the salary will increase to Grade 6.