Computational Linguist for AI Singapore (Makerspace)

About AI Singapore

AI Singapore (AISG) is a national AI programme launched by the National Research Foundation (NRF) to anchor deep national capabilities in Artificial Intelligence (AI). The programme office is hosted by the National University of Singapore (NUS) and brings together all Singapore-based research institutions and the vibrant ecosystem of AI start-ups and companies developing AI products to perform use-inspired research, grow the knowledge, create the tools, and develop the talent to power Singapore's AI efforts.

The AI Products division is building regional foundation models (FM) to power its open-source products. Given its regional focus, an important task is the development of high-quality language datasets for machine training purposes. As such, we are looking for a dedicated computational linguist who can take charge of the language datasets track.

Duties and Responsibilities

• Develop means for more automated data annotation for Southeast Asian languages.
• Adapt existing annotation guidelines (for English etc.) or develop new ones for data annotation projects.
• Adapt existing benchmarks for evaluating new Foundation Models (FM).
• Adapt existing FM fine-tuning methodologies or develop new ones to achieve SOTA performance for new FM.
• Perform linguistic research to inform decision-making in guideline formulation.
• Curate data sources to select suitable data for the specific task at hand.
• Perform quality control on annotated data and collaborate closely with external quality controllers and data annotators to iteratively improve on data quality.
• Keep abreast of the latest developments in language resources for NLP.

Qualifications

• An advanced degree in Linguistics, Computational Linguistics or equivalent practical experience.
• Proficiency in English and at least one Southeast Asian language is highly preferred.
• Experience in linguistics research publication and conference presentations.
• Experience working with data annotation or crowdsourcing platforms.
• Familiar with linguistic concepts (strong understanding of morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics is preferred).
• Able to work with and analyse unfamiliar languages.
• Familiarity with NLP tasks is a plus.
• Knowledge of programming languages, especially Python, is a plus.
• Good communication skills (as work is highly collaborative).