School of Computing and Communications
Salary:   £29,619 to £34,308
Closing Date:   Friday 26 August 2022
Interview Date:   To be confirmed
Reference:  0809-22
https://hr-jobs.lancs.ac.uk/Vacancy.aspx?ref=0809-22

The School of Computing and Communications (SCC) within Lancaster University’s 
Faculty of Science and Technology, is seeking to appoint a Research Associate 
(RA) to work on two connected research projects on Natural Language Processing 
(NLP) for the Welsh language. FreeTxt/TestunRhydd 
(https://ucrel.lancs.ac.uk/freetxt/) is funded by the AHRC as a follow-on 
funding for impact and engagement project. Thesawrws 
(https://corcencc.org/thesawrws/) is funded by the Welsh Government and will 
use word embeddings and other NLP techniques to create an open-access, 
freely-available online thesaurus of contemporary Welsh.

Working together with project partners at Cardiff University (led by Dr Dawn 
Knight as PI), and stakeholders in the FreeTxt/TestunRhydd project advisory 
group (National Trust Wales, Cadw, National Museum Wales), the RA will continue 
the co-design, development and implementation of a well documented and 
thoroughly tested Streamlit web-based software prototype for supporting 
bilingual free-text survey and questionnaire data analysis. While a range of 
sophisticated digital tools for the analysis of text-based data are already 
available, particularly for researchers working in academia, in marketing and 
public relations contexts etc., many of the digital resources used are not 
necessarily affordable, quick and easy to use, and/or accessible to non-expert 
users. Specifically, these tools currently do not fully support the task of 
systematically processing free-text responses in Welsh. The FreeTxt/TestunRhydd 
project aims to bridge this gap between quantitative and qualitative forms of 
survey data by building the novel FreeTxt toolkit which is designed to support 
the analysis and visualisation of multiple forms of open-ended, free-text data 
in both English and Welsh.

In the Thesawrws project, the RA will work on developing an open-access, freely 
available online thesaurus of the Welsh language, for Welsh speakers and 
learners alike. The RA’s work will draw on pre-existing word embeddings to find 
related words, and the CorCenCC project Welsh semantic tagger and human 
evaluators to refine the similarities to enhance this resource. For the 
language user, this represents a valuable resource which goes beyond 
traditional thesauri and it will be available publicly as a fully bilingual, 
user-friendly website, released via the main CorCenCC project website 
(http://www.corcencc.org/).

The RA will be part of an internationally recognised centre of expertise for 
corpus-based natural language processing (UCREL), and will work directly with 
Professor Paul Rayson and Dr Mo El-Haj in SCC. For more details, please see the 
associated job description and person specification for this position. 
Potential candidates can also make informal enquiries to Professor Paul Rayson 
([email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>) and Dr Mo El-Haj 
([email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>).

This is a full-time position expected to start in September 2022, and the RA 
will join on an indefinite contract, however the role remains contingent on 
external funding, which for this position which for this position ends 10th 
March 2023.

Lancaster University are committed to family-friendly and flexible working 
policies on an individual basis. The School is also an Athena Swan Bronze Award 
holder, driving good employment practice and initiatives to address gender 
inequalities in Computing higher education and research. We welcome 
applications from people in all diversity groups.


--
Paul Rayson
Director of UCREL and Professor of Natural Language Processing
Group Lead (SCC Data Science)
School of Computing and Communications, InfoLab21, Lancaster University, 
Lancaster, LA1 4WA, UK.
Web: http://www.research.lancs.ac.uk/portal/en/people/Paul-Rayson/
Tel: +44 1524 510357
Contact me on 
Teams<https://teams.microsoft.com/l/chat/0/[email protected]>

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