King's College London

About us

King’s College London is home to the world’s largest Department of Digital Humanities, located within the Faculty of Arts & Humanities. We are internationally recognised for our interdisciplinary research and teaching at the intersection of the humanities and computational methods. The successful candidate will join the Computational Humanities research group, a vibrant and collaborative team dedicated to advancing data-driven approaches to historical, linguistic, and cultural research. This post is part of the 5-year project Computational Corpus Annotation for Quantitative Analysis of Latin Lexical Semantics (COALA), successfully evaluated by the ERC as a Consolidator Grant and funded by UKRI, led by Dr Barbara McGillivray.

About the role

We are seeking a Postdoctoral Research Associate in Computational Linguistics to lead the computational stream of the COALA project.

This role is an exciting opportunity to contribute to a pioneering project at the intersection of natural language processing, historical linguistics, and computational humanities.

The postholder will lead the computational stream of the project, which involves building a large corpus of Latin texts (data collection and pre-processing), mining dictionary data, and developing novel algorithms for time-sensitive word sense disambiguation (WSD) in Latin, contributing to the creation of a 100-million-token annotated corpus, and conducting large-scale quantitative analyses of semantic change. You will work closely with Latin linguists to integrate linguistic insights into computational models and help build open-source tools and resources that will support future research in historical semantics and NLP.

You will be responsible to the Principal Investigator and will collaborate with a team of postdoctoral researchers and external advisors across linguistics, NLP, and classical studies.

This is a full time post (35 hours per week), and you will be offered a fixed term contract for approximately  2 years and 11 months (with the possibility of extension)

Research staff at King’s are entitled to at least 10 days per year (pro-rata) for professional development. This entitlement, from the  Concordat to Support the Career Development of Researchers, applies to Postdocs, Research Assistants, Research and Teaching Technicians, Teaching Fellows and AEP equivalent up to and including grade 7. Visit the Centre for Research Staff Development for more information.

About you

To be successful in this role, we are looking for candidates to have the following skills and experience:

Essential criteria

1. PhD awarded in Computational Linguistics, Natural Language Processing, or a closely related field or PhD near completion in Computational Linguistics, Natural Language Processing, or a closely related field*
2. Demonstrated experience with computational semantics models, word sense disambiguation, or semantic change detection
3. Proficiency in Python and relevant NLP libraries
4. Experience working with large-scale corpora or annotation pipelines
5. Strong publication record comparable with your career stage
6. Ability to work collaboratively in interdisciplinary teams
7. Excellent written and verbal communication skills

Desirable criteria

1. Experience with historical texts or historical languages, especially Latin
2. Familiarity with corpus annotation standards and tools
3. Knowledge of diachronic NLP or time-sensitive semantic modelling
4. Interest in digital humanities or historical linguistics

* 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. Should the successful candidate be awaiting the award of their PhD, the appointment will be made at Grade 5, spinal point 30 with the title of Research Assistant until confirmation of the award of the PhD has been received. Upon confirmation of the award of the PhD, the job title will become Research Associate and the salary will increase to Grade 6, spine point 31.

Downloading a copy of our Job Description

Full details of the role and the skills, knowledge and experience required can be found in the Job Description document, provided at the bottom of the page. This document will provide information of what criteria will be assessed at each stage of the recruitment process.

Further information

We pride ourselves on being inclusive and welcoming. We embrace diversity and want everyone to feel that they belong and are connected to others in our community.

We are committed to working with our staff and unions on these and other issues, to continue to support our people and to develop a diverse and inclusive culture at King's.

As part of this commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion, it is our aim to develop candidate pools that include applicants from all backgrounds and communities.

We ask all candidates to submit a copy of their CV, and a supporting statement, detailing how they meet the essential criteria listed in the advert. If we receive a strong field of candidates, we may use the desirable criteria to choose our final shortlist, so please include your evidence against these where possible.

To find out how our managers will review your application, please take a look at our ‘ How we Recruit’ pages.