Vacancies

Political irony in public discourse (e.g., in political satire) is often misunderstood, and appreciated only by recipients in agreement with the speaker. Irony may be marked in various ways, for instance through prosody and hyperbole, but the role and form of such markers is unclear. Our project comprises three stages, in which we study:

the use of irony markers through computational analysis;their functions through cognitive modeling, andtheir communicative effects through experiments.

Together, these findings enrich theories on language, communication and cognition, and help in assessing the ways in which irony leads to misinformation and polarization. The project is highly interdisciplinary, combining elements from the linguistics literature on irony and prosody with communication-scientific insights into political satire and cognitive-scientific insights into processing.

This position is part of the Collective Information Project, which will eventually employ a total of five junior researchers. It is funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) under the VICI scheme.

The aim of the Collective Information Project is to improve our understanding of how best to aggregate information supplied by several independent agents and how the structural properties of the kind of information we wish to aggregate influences the performance of different aggregation mechanisms. Potential applications range from political elections and recommender systems (aggregation of preferences), to crowdsourcing campaigns (aggregation of expert judgments), to knowledge engineering (aggregation of ontologies).

We are looking for an exceptional postdoctoral researcher in the area of Semantics and Computational Modeling within the project ' Cognitive Semantics and Quantities’ [CoSaQ]. Computational Modeling of Quantification' . This is a 5-year project (2017-2021) funded with 1.500.000 Euros by the European Research Council, and led by Principal Investigator (PI) Jakub Szymanik.

We are looking to fill one postdoc position in Language and Computation within the project EXPRESS: From the Expression of Disagreement to New Foundations for Expressivist Semantics (see Express). This is a five-year project funded by a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant and led by Dr Luca Incurvati (Principal Investigator). The project aims to develop a novel theory and logic of the way disagreement is expressed in dialogue. This theory will then be used to establish a novel approach to natural language semantics, inferential expressivism.