The Transducens Research Group at University of Alicante, Spain, welcomes expressions of interest from Postdoctoral researchers with an excellent track record of research and publication to apply jointly to the European Commission Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellowship Scheme in 2025 (MSCA-PF-2025) in the area of natural language processing, specifically in machine translation, low-resource languages, corpus acquisition and curation, computer-assisted translation, and language learning through conversational interactions in artificial intelligence systems..

Transducens research group, attached to Institute for Computing Research, holds nearly 25 years of experience and has actively witnessed all the most important paradigms in natural language processing, namely rule-based (we are well-known for being the inceptors of the apertium.org platform in 2005), then statistical, and, currently, deep-learning-based. Over the last few years, our team has been active in 6 European language technology consortia like paracrawl.eu, gourmet-project.eu, multitrainmt.eu, and macocu.eu, always with an emphasis on endangered languages and open-source technologies. Our team's medium size promotes a direct and familial communication style where formalities are set aside in favour of easy and open interactions.

See Transducens’ publications at bit.ly/pubtransducens.

We look forward to engaging with researchers who demonstrate initiative, a strong motivation for scientifically robust work, and who also find joy and fulfilment in their research. As part of this Postdoctoral Fellowship, you will advance your research career under our mentorship, striking a good balance between your independence and the integration with our experience. Additionally, you will benefit from a generous allowance that will support both your relocation and living expenses in Alicante, ensuring a comfortable transition and lifestyle for you and, where applicable, your family. 

THE PROJECT

Although we are open to proposals that address different topics, we believe that our group's strengths are best utilized in proposals that align with one or more of the following areas: 

- Knowledge-enhanced neural machine translation for low-resource languages from multiple sources of information (foundational models or linguistic signals, for example). 

- Corpus acquisition and curation leveraging neural approaches and large language models (LLMs) to identify, download, and filter multimodal contents to feed multilingual models. 

- Artificial intelligence systems (LLMs mostly) that learn new languages via conversations with speakers or interaction with minimal amounts of text.

- Conversational and deep-learning-based tools for computer-aided translation.

CANDIDATE’S REQUIREMENTS:

*Research Field 

The applicant, according to his previous background and interest, could will participate in any of the abovementioned research lines that tackle crucial aspects about work on neural machine translation, corpus acquisition and curation, low-resource languages, organic language learning by machines, conversational computer-assisted translation.

* Call requirements: 

Warning: Applicants should check eligibility and mobility conditions of MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships, such as:

a) To be eligible should have a PhD at the time of the deadline for applications and must have a maximum of eight years’ experience in research.

b) Comply with mobility rules: Not have resided or carried out your main activity (work, studies, etc.) in Spain for more than 12 months in the 36 months immediately before the call deadline.

* How to Apply: 

Applicants shall send a CV (max. 4 pages) including a brief description of your career, main publications, contributions to congresses, and experience in the fieldwork, together with a one-page research proposal to msca2024@dlsi.ua.es, before 30th june 2025.

 The International RTD Projects Unit will provide you a tailor made support and guidance during the proposal preparation with the following:

• Administrative aspects 
• Budget preparation
• Funding & Tenders Opportunities Portal
• Training on how to write a competitive MSCA PF proposal (July3-4th, 2025) online.
• Proposal revision by our staff

HOST INSTITUTION

The University of Alicante (UA) was created in 1979. In 2024-25 UA educated and trained 26.473 students (58,79% women) who are enrolled in any of the 54 undergraduate and 96 postgraduate programmes, being one of the fastest growing universities in Spain. UA employs 4.293 researchers and management staff (47% women), with an annual budget of 269 million Euros in 2024. Currently, UA is investing near to 68M Euros to boost frontier research and technology transfer processes via spin off, licensing and international promotion mainly. In 2024, the University received 41.5 million Euros at National, Regional, European level and private R&D thanks to 1.016 new agreements achieved by researchers working in 251 research groups hosted in 13 Research Institutes, most of them multidisciplinary based. Despite its youth, the University of Alicante is already present in the three main university rankings in the world, as shown here.

In 2024, the University of Alicante has consolidated its position in the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU-FIELD), known as Shanghai Ranking, in its classification by fields of knowledge. In the 2024 edition, the University of Alicante has managed to further improve on last year’s excellent performance in the field of Tourism and Hotel Management, when it was ranked 76-100th in the world. Excellent performance has also been achieved in other fields of knowledge, such as in Nursing (151-200) and Chemical Engineering (401-500); Ecology (201-300) and Economics ranked 401-500th in the world classification.

Amongst this international activity, UA´s involvement in European Programmes has been increasing since CECA Programme and improving leadership, taking part in 50 FP5 and FP6, 49 FP7, 51 H2020 and 37 Horizon Europe projects. This activity is not only limited to DG Research, but also intensive in other Programmes: 29 Erasmus Mundus, 65 Tempus and 35 Lifelong Learning Projects, 12 DG Justice Actions and 7 Life Grants among others (Funding and Tenders EC data). Also, UA is strategically involved in several EU initiatives: BBI, Hydrogen Europe Research, EERA, EOSC, etc.

In terms of international proposal and post grant award, UA offers a tailor made support to researchers at legal, financial and administrative level provided by  the International RTD Projects Unit with a strong track record in supporting European RTD-consortia in proposal preparation, communication with the funding authorities and project reporting. UA is also partner of the European IP Helpdesk and coordinates the Latin America and India IP SME Helpdesks and the is Regional Node of Enterprise Europe Network for 17 years now. 

Furthermore, UA became EURAXESS contact point through University of Alicante’s Research Talent Attraction Office, intended as a one-stop, centrally managed platform to support researchers wishing to join our University.

UA has been awarded with the HRS4R seal, that endorses our commitment to the principles of “The European Charter for Researchers” and “The Code of Conduct for the recruitment of Researchers”.