Postdoc: Interpretable LMs for Historical Texts

University of Basel; Basel; On-site; CHF 90,000 - 120,000; Part time

Benefits offered by this job

sciCORE access to GPU resources

Relocation support for international/h

International research environment

Job summary

The Digital Humanities Laboratories (DHLabs) at the University of Basel invite applications for a postdoctoral researcher (80%) to start March 1, 2027 or by arrangement. You will lead the computational work for a project on probabilistic texts, fine-tune open-weight models on historical corpora, and contribute to a public benchmark with the team of literary historians and computer scientists.

Requirements include a doctorate in a computational field, hands-on experience with transformers

Qualifications

• Doctoral degree in a computational field with substantial computation
• Hands-on experience training and analyzing transformer models in Python
• Experience with interpretability methods and benchmarking datasets

Responsibilities

• Lead computational work for the project with supervision by PI and collaborators
• Fine-tune open-weight language models on period texts using parameter-efficient methods
• Build the attribution pipeline and validate with SHAP, probing, and causal-interventions
• Run systematic model tests and prompting experiments with literary historians
• Lead or co-author papers and contribute to the benchmark release and related publications

Skills

Transformer models

Python

NLP research

Experiment design

English communication

Education

Doctorate in CS/NLP/ML or related field

Tools

PyTorch

Hugging Face

GPU clusters

Job description

The Digital Humanities Laboratories (DHLabs) at the University of Basel invite applications for a postdoctoral researcher (80%) to start March 1, 2027 or by arrangement. You will lead the computational work for a project on probabilistic texts, fine-tune open-weight models on historical corpora, and contribute to a public benchmark with the team of literary historians and computer scientists.

Requirements include a doctorate in a computational field, hands-on experience with transformers