Postdoc: LLM Interpretability in Digital Humanities

University of Basel; Schweiz; Presencial; CHF 60.000 - 90.000; A tiempo parcial

Descripción de la vacante

The Digital Humanities Laboratories (DHLabs) at the University of Basel seek a postdoctoral researcher (80%) to lead computational work for a four-year project on probabilistic texts. You will supervise model fine-tuning, evaluation, and benchmarking, collaborating with partners in Sorbonne University and ETH Zürich.

Requirements include a doctorate in a relevant field, hands-on experience with PyTorch/Hugging Face, and a strong interest in historical texts and the philosophy of language.

Formación

• A doctorate in computer science, NLP or computational linguistics, machine learning, digital or computational humanities, or a related field with a substantial computational component.
• Hands-on experience training, fine-tuning and analysing transformer language models in Python (PyTorch, Hugging Face).
• Experience with interpretability methods (feature attribution, probing, activation patching) and/or with building evaluation datasets and benchmarks.
• Experience designing experiments with proper controls, baselines and statistical care, and reproducible research-software practice.
• A serious interest in historical texts, literary theory and the philosophy of language, and in reading model outputs closely alongside literary historians.
• Strong English; knowledge of German is welcome.

Responsabilidades

• preparing and validating the historical corpora (OCR quality, genre and date metadata) with the project's research assistant
• fine-tuning open-weight language models on period texts (continued pretraining with parameter-efficient methods such as LoRA)
• building the attribution pipeline, with token-level SHAP checked against probing and causal-intervention methods
• running systematic model tests and controlled prompting experiments with the team's literary historians
• leading the technical side of the benchmark release (documentation, baselines, public leaderboard)
• leading or co-authoring papers at NLP and machine-learning venues and co-authoring the project's humanities publications

Conocimientos

Transformer models

Python (PyTorch)

Hugging Face

Interpretability methods

Experiment design

Literary theory

Educación

Doctorate in CS / NLP / computational linguistics

Herramientas

GPU clusters

Descripción del empleo

The Digital Humanities Laboratories (DHLabs) at the University of Basel seek a postdoctoral researcher (80%) to lead computational work for a four-year project on probabilistic texts. You will supervise model fine-tuning, evaluation, and benchmarking, collaborating with partners in Sorbonne University and ETH Zürich.

Requirements include a doctorate in a relevant field, hands-on experience with PyTorch/Hugging Face, and a strong interest in historical texts and the philosophy of language.