Research Associate in Natural Language Processing - Sheffield, United Kingdom - University of Sheffield

University of Sheffield

Verified Company

Sheffield, United Kingdom

1 week ago

Posted by:

Tom O´Connor

beBee Recruiter

Description

Are you interested in working for a world top 100 university? Are you an ambitious Natural Language Processing expert looking to work with world leading researchers to further your skills and turn them into cutting-edge NLP tools that can potentially impact our democratic election practices? Then this one-year long research project is just the opportunity

Democratic elections should be free and fair if they are to maintain public trust. To ensure these qualities, societies rely on transparency mechanisms to identify concerning practice.

To date, however, systems of electoral oversight have failed to adapt to the digital age, meaning efforts to expose corruption rely on time-consuming manual practice.

The project 'Delivering Trustworthy Electoral Oversight:

Developing an Automated Analysis of Electoral Spending Disclosures in the UK' is funded by the Trustworthy Autonomous Systems Pump Priming Programme, and is a joint project between the University of Sussex (led by Dr Sam Power from the Department of Politics) and the University of Sheffield (led by Professor Kate Dommett from the Department of Politics and International Relations and Dr Ziqi Zhang from the Information School).

It combines computational methods with political science classification techniques to build an automated system for the analysis of electoral spending returns.

Moreover, it tests public and practitioner perceptions of this tool to identify how to foster public trust in this technique as a means of electoral oversight.

This post will be based at the Information School, the University of Sheffield.

The post-holder will have solid knowledge and experience in NLP and machine learning, particularly in text classification, named entity recognition and linking, and handling noisy text data.

You will take a lead role in research and development activities on the project. You will be directly supervised by Professor Kate Dommett and Dr Ziqi Zhang.

Your tasks will include (not limited to): text data cleansing and conversion, document zoning, document structure analysis, text classification, named entity extraction and linking, and report writing.

The project will ultimately develop an automated tool that can classify electoral spending records into predefined categories.

The project offers not only an excellent opportunity to join a world-leading research organisation to develop knowledge and skills in cutting-edge NLP technology, but also an opportunity to develop solutions that will have real impact on our society

If you feel like you would be a good fit for the role, we would love to hear from you
We're one of the best not-for-profit organisations to work for in the UK.

The University's Total Reward Package includes a competitive salary, a generous Pension Scheme and annual leave entitlement, as well as access to a range of learning and development courses to support your personal and professional development.

We build teams of people from different heritages and lifestyles from across the world, whose talent and contributions complement each other to greatest effect.

We believe diversity in all its forms delivers greater impact through research, teaching and student experience.