Applications are invited for a 2-years position as postdoctoral researcher within the research project “Graphs and Ontologies for Literary Evolution Models” (GOLEM), financed by an ERC Starting Grant and coordinated by the Principal Investigator (PI), Dr Federico Pianzola. This is an interdisciplinary project at the intersection of NLP, Digital Humanities, and Semantic Web technology.
Millions of stories are shared on online platforms such as Wattpad, AO3, and Fanfiction.net, combined with readers' reactions and comments on these stories. The GOLEM project will analyze stories and their responses gathered from sites in five different languages – English, Spanish, Italian, Korean and Indonesian. This analysis can provide a wealth of information about the characters in a story, the genre, what a story is about, how a story is constructed, what themes are covered, as well as what readers from different countries and cultures find important in a story.
The core infrastructure of the project is a graph database of ca. 8 million stories, including information extracted from the full text of the stories via NLP techniques. Some information is already available in structured format, some other can be imported from resources like Wikidata or fan wikis. In addition, both the full text and the existing triples can be leveraged for the extension of the knowledge graph via automated reasoning, inferential learning, and other techniques.
The project will hire a postdoctoral researcher, who will work in the GOLEM lab.
Your tasks:
In collaboration with the other team members, you will work on the creation of a knowledge graph database generated extracting structured information from unstructured narrative text.
You will contribute to:
- Enrich a knowledge graph database with information obtained via NLP.
- Use neurosymbolic AI to extract information from unstructured text.
- Use NLP methods for modelling narrative text.
The focus on each of these tasks can vary based on the expertise of the applicant.
The University of Groningen
Since its foundation in 1614, the University of Groningen has established an international reputation as a dynamic and innovative university offering high-quality teaching and research. Its 33,000 students are encouraged to develop their own individual talents through challenging study- and career paths. The University of Groningen is an international centre of knowledge: It belongs to the best research universities in Europe and is allied with prestigious partner universities and networks worldwide.
The Faculty of Arts
The Faculty of Arts is a large, dynamic faculty in the heart of the city of Groningen. It has more than 5000 students and 700 staff members, who are working at the frontiers of knowledge every day. The Faculty offers a wide range of degree programmes: 15 Bachelor's programmes and over 35 Master's specialisations. Our research, which is internationally widely acclaimed, covers Archaeology, Cultural Studies, History, International Relations, Language and Literary Studies, Linguistics and Media and Journalism Studies.
For this role, we are looking for someone who:
- Has a PhD degree in any area related to the tasks (e.g. Computer Science, Digital Humanities, or Information Science).
- Has experience in extracting structured information from unstructured documents.
- Hhas experience working with text in multiple languages.
- Is committed to Open Source and Open Science practices.
- Has an independent, proactive work ethic.
- Has good academic writing skills in English.
- Knowledge of Dutch is NOT required.
We offer in accordance with the collective bargaining agreement for Dutch universities:
- A salary, depending on qualifications and work experience, with a minimum of € 3,378 to a maximum of € 5,331 (salary scale 10, UFO profile researcher 4) gross per month for a full-time position.
- 8% holiday allowance and 8,3% end-of-year bonus.
- Participation in a pension scheme for employees.
- Favourable tax agreements for non-Dutch applicants may be applicable.
- 232 holiday hours per calendar by full-time employment.
- An employment contract for the duration of 26 months, ending by operation of law after this period.
The candidate is expected to start in November 2025.
Do you want to become a member of our team? Please send your application to us, by submitting the following documents in English:
- Letter of application.
- Curriculum Vitae.
- A writing sample (e.g. a chapter of your PhD thesis, a peer-reviewed article, or a publication).
- A copy of PhD certificate (or proof for the submission and approval of the manuscript) and list of grades.
- Contact information of two academic referees.
You may apply for this position until 14 August 11:59 PM / before 15 August 2025 Dutch local time (CEST) by means of the application form (click on “Apply”; below on the advertisement on the university website).
The selection interviews will take place in the last week of August 2025.
The University of Groningen strives to be a university in which students and staff are re-spected and feel at home, regardless of differences in background, experiences, per-spectives, and identities. We believe that working on our core values of inclusion and equality are a joint responsibility and we are constructively working on creating a socially safe environment. Diversity among students and staff members enriches academic de-bate and contributes to the quality of our teaching and research. We therefore invite ap-plicants from underrepresented groups in particular to apply. For more information, see also our diversity policy webpage:
https://www.rug.nl/about-ug/policy-and-strategy/diversity-and-inclusion/
Our selection procedure follows the guidelines of the Recruitment code (NVP):
https://www.nvp-hrnetwerk.nl/nl/sollicitatiecode and European Commission's European Code of Conduct for recruitment of researchers:
https://euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/charter/code
Unsolicited marketing is not appreciated.