[HPSG-L] Tenure-track position at KU Leuven

[Jeroen van Craenenbroeck]

FACULTY POSITION AT KU LEUVEN
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**Assistant Professor: Language technologist with expertise in 
Artificial Intelligence** (ref. ZAP-2019-171)

The Faculty of Arts at KU Leuven offers a fulltime tenure-track position 
(100% assistant professor) for a language technologist with expertise in 
the domain of Artificial Intelligence. We are looking for candidates who 
are internationally oriented, have and excellent research record and 
relevant teaching competence in Artificial Intelligence.

The Department of Linguistics at KU Leuven is an internationally 
oriented center for research and training in linguistics. The department 
is committed to a wide range of approaches to the study of language(s), 
with a focus on different research methods, theoretical frameworks and 
phenomena. Candidates have a profile that complements the existing 
expertise within the department and that will help to set up 
interdisciplinary collaboration with other departments and centers 
within and beyond the Faculty of Arts at KU Leuven.

Duties
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**Research**
You conduct research in the domain of theoretical or applied 
linguistics, with a specific focus on the interface between linguistics 
and Artificial Intelligence. You develop a coherent research program in 
which state-of-the-art techniques such as deep learning (for natural 
language processing), or more broadly, artificial neural networks are 
implemented in linguistic research. The application of these techniques 
can be situated in corpus compilation, annotation and analysis, but also 
in simulation and computational modeling. You join in with one or more 
topics that are of central importance to the research groups of the 
Linguistics Department, and more broadly the Faculty of Arts, such as 
semantic and morphosyntactic classification, distributional semantics, 
language acquisition, automatic recognition and synthesis of multimodal 
and multimedia data, (face-to-face) interaction, automatic translation, 
automatic parsing, formal-theoretical linguistics and variational 
linguistics.

You become a member of the research group that matches your research 
profile best. At the same time, you support and develop initiatives that 
connect the research of the research group or department with other 
research domains, both within and beyond the Faculty of Arts, in which 
Artificial Intelligence plays or may play an important role (e.g. 
through active membership of the Leuven Centre for Artificial 
Intelligence or the Centre for Language, Technology and Application). 
You will take initiatives to acquire competitive funding, and will 
actively help to build future (interdisciplinary) research projects.

**Teaching**
You will have a teaching assignment of about 20-25 ECTS credits in the 
bachelor program Linguistics and Literature, the master in Linguistics, 
the master in Artificial Intelligence, and optionally also in the master 
Digital Humanities, with a clear commitment to the quality of the 
program as a whole. Your teaching is expected to meet the standards of 
an academic program in terms of its level, orientation and academic 
content.

You contribute to the pedagogical project of the faculty by supervising 
master’s theses in the above-mentioned master programs and by taking 
initiatives for the training of junior researchers in your domain of 
expertise (e.g. as part of the PhD program).

Your teaching assignment will primarily take place on the faculty’s 
campus in Leuven, but you should be prepared to take on teaching 
assignments on other campuses of the faculty and in related programs, 
should this be deemed desirable.

You will develop your teaching approach in keeping with KU Leuven’s 
educational vision, and will make use of the possibilities for 
educational professionalization offered by the faculty and university.

**Service**
You are prepared to take on internal administrative and management 
duties, and to assist in intensifying the relations between the programs 
and the professional field.

Profile
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You hold a PhD in Linguistics or Computer Science (or an equivalent 
relevant degree) with a specific focus on the application and/or 
implementation of Artificial Intelligence for linguistic research. Your 
research profile of language technologist with expertise in Artificial 
Intelligence is of added value to the research activities of the 
Department of Linguistics and the Faculty of Arts at KU Leuven.

You have outstanding didactic qualities in academic education and you 
have an excellent research record. The quality of your research should 
be evidenced by high-level international publications.

You possess organizational skills and have a collegial spirit.

Your application file should include a fully developed research proposal 
for the coming years (maximally two pages) and a profile statement 
outlining your view on teaching (maximally two pages).

The official language used at KU Leuven is Dutch. If you do not speak 
Dutch (or do not speak it well) at the start of employment, KU Leuven 
will provide language training to enable you to take part in meetings.

Before teaching courses in Dutch or English, you will be given the 
opportunity to learn the language to the required standard.

Offer
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We offer a fulltime position in an intellectually inspiring environment. 
KU Leuven is a research-intensive, internationally oriented university 
that carries out both fundamental and applied scientific research. It is 
highly inter- and multidisciplinarily focused and strives for 
international excellence. In this regard, it actively works together 
with research partners in Belgium and abroad. It provides its students 
with an academic education that is based on high-quality scientific 
research.

You will work in Leuven, a historic, dynamic and lively city located in 
the heart of Belgium, within 20 minutes from Brussels, the capital of 
the European Union, and less than two hours from Paris, London and 
Amsterdam.

You will be appointed as assistant professor on the tenure track for a 
period of 5 years. After this period and a positive evaluation, you are 
permanently appointed (or tenured) as an associate professor. KU Leuven 
is well-equipped to welcome foreign professors and their family. The 
university provides practical support concerning immigration and 
administration, housing, child care, Dutch courses, career coaching for 
partners, etc. In order to facilitate scientific integration and 
research in the first stage of the appointment, a start-up grant of 
100.000 Euros is offered to new professors who do not have other 
substantial research funding.

Interested?
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A full description of the vacancy can be found at:
https://www.kuleuven.be/personeel/jobsite/jobs/55501283?hl=en&lang=en

For more information please contact Prof. dr. Geert Brône, tel.: +32 3 
502 15 16, mail: geert.brone at kuleuven.be. For problems with online 
applying, please contact solliciteren at kuleuven.be.

KU Leuven places great importance on research integrity and ethical 
conduct and will therefore ask you to sign an integrity statement upon 
appointment.