Postdoc position in Efficient NLP for Information Extraction from News

This 24-month postdoctoral position is a close collaboration between the National Police Lab AI (Floris Bex and Jelte Mense) and the Natural Language Processing Group (Albert Gatt) at Utrecht University. Together, we want to explore how small models can extract useful information on specific crime themes, such as drug trafficking, primarily from publicly available news sources. Relevant tasks include identifying relevant entities (who did what, where), and inferring timelines (when, and in what order) and relations (e.g. links to specific countries or groups). A promising direction is to train or fine-tune small-scale models via distillation from larger models, including through the use of synthetic data. This in turn raises interesting questions about the robustness of the resulting models, their ability to generalise, and their susceptibility to known issues related to synthetic data training, such as model collapse.

As a postdoctoral researcher on this project, you will:

• Design and evaluate methods for multimodal entity, timeline and relation extraction from multilingual news sources.
• Fine-tune and distil small-scale language models from larger models, including via synthetic data generation.
• Investigate the robustness, generalisability and limitations (e.g. model collapse) of the resulting models.
• Apply and validate the approach on real-world use cases, such as drug trafficking, together with the Netherlands police.
• Publish and present your findings at relevant conferences and in scientific journals.

Allround Paraveterinair Gezelschapsdieren Universitair Dierenziekenhuis

Als allround paraveterinair speel je een onmisbare rol in de zorg voor onze patiënten. Je ondersteunt dierenartsen en specialisten bij de opvang en behandeling van voornamelijk tweede- en derdelijns (spoed)patiënten die zowel overdag als buiten kantooruren worden aangemeld. Je krijgt te maken met een grote diversiteit aan patiënten, ziektebeelden en specialistische behandelingen, waardoor je jezelf voortdurend blijft ontwikkelen.

Omdat wij een universitair dierenziekenhuis zijn, begeleid je ook coassistenten in de laatste fase van hun opleiding. Zo draag je niet alleen bij aan de beste zorg voor onze patiënten, maar ook aan de opleiding van toekomstige dierenartsen.

Wij zoeken een collega voor 3 of 4 diensten per week. Ons dierenziekenhuis is 24 uur per dag, 7 dagen per week geopend. Daarom werk je naast doordeweekse dagdiensten op de poli op roulatiebasis ook mee in de avond- en nachtdiensten in het weekend.

Assistant Professor of Clinical Psychology

As an Assistant Professor in Clinical Psychology, you will teach students and conduct research, both within the field of Clinical Psychology. Your academic profile aligns with the mission and vision of the Clinical Psychology department (https://www.uu.nl/en/organisation/clinical-psychology/mission-vision-and-strategy).

With respect to teaching, you will teach in the Dutch Bachelor’s programme in Psychology in the domains relevant to Clinical Psychology and the international Master’s programme in Clinical Psychology. Teaching involves (large-scale) lectures, (small-scale) instruction and individual supervision of clinical or research internships and research theses, along with more general coordination and administration activities.

With respect to research, your past and intended future research should align with the broader domain of clinical psychological science and contribute to advancing knowledge of the nature, prevalence, underlying individual and interpersonal etiological or maintaining mechanisms, and prevention and treatment of common mental health disorders and/or trauma- and stressor-related disorders. Your research should combine methodological rigor with societal relevance, preferably in close collaboration with mental health care institutions and involving clinical populations.

You are motivated to mentor and support early-career researchers in their scientific and professional development.

We place great importance on collaboration, open knowledge exchange, and a collegial atmosphere within the department. We are looking for team players who work well independently while also contributing actively to shared goals and a positive work environment.

The core tasks include:

• Participating in teaching at a bachelor’s and master’s level. Teaching involves individual supervision; lectures and workgroups in clinically oriented courses;
• Coordination of parts of the curriculum;
• Participating in research on mechanisms, prevention, and treatment of common mental health disorders and/or trauma- and stressor-related disorders;
• Publishing research findings in international scientific journals;
• Contributing to the acquisition of external research funding for the benefit of the research programme;
• Contributing to collaboration, and a collegial atmosphere within the department;
• Mentor and support the scientific and professional development of early-career researchers.

For our education and research programs, experience with treating patients is desirable. This job position is open to those with a research orientation, as well as those who are more clinically oriented.

PhD Computational Semantic Representations: a Multilingual Language-Change Study

The Department of Methodology & Statistics at the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences has a job opening for PhD candidate. In the position of PhD candidate, you are responsible for conducting original research on computational models of semantic change and synonymy evolution across historical corpora, structured around three lines of work: (1) modelling semantic relationships across time; (2) interpretability of semantic change models; and (3) generalization across languages and domains. You will carry out activities like developing, benchmarking, and refining NLP pipelines, analysing multilingual historical datasets, and disseminating your findings through publications and presentations.

Your main tasks and responsibilities include:

• Designing, implementing, and evaluating computational models using contextualized word embeddings and LLMs to track semantic change and synonymy evolution across time.
• developing hierarchical clustering architectures to identify and track polysemous senses in historical corpora.
• applying the framework to English (COCA/COHA), Dutch (Delpher), and Spanish (RAE) data to automatically detect synonyms and measure semantic trajectories.
• building and maintaining an open-source pipeline for the broader language change research community.
• investigating whether observed evolutionary tendencies are universal or language specific.
• contributing to the intersection of computational linguistics and the Social and Behavioural Sciences through interdisciplinary collaboration.
• writing and publishing scientific articles in international journals and presenting at conferences.
• participating in the academic community of the Department and the research group, including seminars and workshops.
• contributing to teaching or departmental tasks for up to 10% of your appointment.

PhD Mental Imagery in Mood Disorders: Cognitive Mechanisms and Implications

Compared with verbal thoughts, mental images evoke stronger emotional responses and may increase vulnerability to emotional distress.

Intrusive mental imagery has therefore emerged as an important transdiagnostic factor across psychological disorders. However, it remains unclear which characteristics of intrusive mental imagery (e.g. vividness, emotional intensity and perceived uncontrollability) are most clinically relevant and through which cognitive mechanisms they contribute to emotional distress and the persistence of mood disorders.

The overall aim of this project is to improve our understanding of the characteristics and cognitive mechanisms underlying intrusive mental imagery and to translate these insights into more targeted imagery-based psychological interventions.

Planned studies include a scoping review; experimental studies; qualitative interviews; and the development and evaluation of an imagery-based intervention.

Supervision Team
The project will be supervised by Dr. Jaël van Bentum, Prof. Elske Salemink, and Prof. Eline Regeer. The project is embedded in the Department of Clinical Psychology. The candidate will join the Dutch-Flemish Postgraduate School Experimental Psychopathology, which provides additional training and facilitates networking and collaboration with other researchers in the field of Experimental Psychopathology.

Your tasks

• designing and conducting a series of studies (including a scoping review, experimental laboratory research, qualitative interviews and intervention development);
• recruiting participants and coordinating data collection in laboratory and clinical settings;
• analysing quantitative and qualitative data using appropriate research methods;
• publishing your findings in international peer-reviewed journals and presenting your work at national and international conferences;
• collaborating with researchers at Utrecht University and with external clinical partners;
• contributing to teaching activities within the Department of Clinical Psychology (approximately 10% of your appointment).