Postdoc: Pioneering LM Interpretability for Historical Texts

Universität Basel; Basel; On-site; CHF 90,000 - 130,000; Part time

Job summary

University of Basel's Digital Humanities Laboratories invites applications for a postdoctoral researcher (80%) in contralab. You will lead computational work, fine-tune open-weight models on eighteenth-century texts, and co-author papers with linguists and historians.

You will work under Prof. Dhaliwal and collaborate with Dr. Juan Luis Gastaldi, contributing to a public benchmark, datasets, and open science practices. This role supports your research trajectory.

Qualifications

• A doctorate by appointment in computer science, NLP or related field with computational component.
• Hands-on experience training and fine-tuning transformer language models (Python, PyTorch, Hugging Face).
• Experience with interpretability methods and building evaluation datasets/benchmarks.
• Experience designing experiments with proper controls and reproducible research practices.

Responsibilities

• Lead computational work for the project, co-supervised by PI and partner.
• Fine-tune open-weight language models on period texts (LoRA,continued pretraining).
• Build the attribution pipeline with SHAP checks against probing methods.
• Run systematic model tests and prompting experiments with historians.
• Lead the benchmark release (documentation, baselines, public leaderboard).
• Co-author papers for NLP/ML venues and humanities publications.

Skills

Python

NLP

Transformer models

LoRA

Statistical methods

Reproducible research

Education

PhD in CS/NLP/ML/Computational humanities

Tools

GPU clusters

Hugging Face Transformers

Python tooling

Job description

University of Basel's Digital Humanities Laboratories invites applications for a postdoctoral researcher (80%) in contralab. You will lead computational work, fine-tune open-weight models on eighteenth-century texts, and co-author papers with linguists and historians.

You will work under Prof. Dhaliwal and collaborate with Dr. Juan Luis Gastaldi, contributing to a public benchmark, datasets, and open science practices. This role supports your research trajectory.