Student assistant - corpus linguistics
Universität zu Köln
Branche : Öffentlicher Dienst & Verwaltung
- Beschäftigungsart:
- Studentische Hilfskraft
- Dauer:
- at least one year
- Beginn:
- 01.03.2027
- Vergütung:
- university rate
- Tätigkeitsbereich:
- Hilfskraft Studierendenwerk / Hochschule / Universität
- Fachbereich:
- Sprachwissenschaften
- Berufserfahrung:
- keine Angabe
- Einsatzort:
- Köln
- Home-Office möglich:
- Ja
- Kontaktaufnahme:
Stellenbeschreibung
Student Assistant (M/F/D) – Corpus Linguistics
Description
The team at the Chair of English Diachronic Linguistics (Prof. Dr. Beatrix Busse) is currently looking for a new student assistant (SHK) focusing on corpus linguistics. As a research assistant, you will be working on multiple interdisciplinary linguistic research projects currently conducted. Focusing on historical linguistics, you will mostly support us in annotating and maintaining a corpus of 16th-19th century English grammar books. The contract will run for a minimum period of one year, with at least 26 hours per month at the standard university rate. The preferred start date is 1 March 2027. Interviews are likely to take place in early January 2027 via Zoom.
Your Tasks
As a new student assistant, you will support us in:
- Transcribing, annotating and managing corpus data
- Working with state-of-the-art tools and applications for interdisciplinary linguistic research projects (primarily in Python)
- Applying current tools and methods from computational and corpus linguistics (primarily in VS Code)
- Participating in weekly meetings along with the rest of the team
What We Offer
- An interactive, supportive, and interdisciplinary research environment
- A very co-creative team
- Flexible working hours and remote work
- An opportunity to practically apply and experiment with state-of-the-art language technology
- An opportunity to contribute to new applications and tools used in linguistic research
- A network of faculty and students within corpus, computational and historical linguistics
Contact details
Contact Person: Dr. Daniela Schröder
E-Mail address: daniela.schroeder@uni-koeln.de
If you are interested in this position, please apply via email with a short cover letter and CV by 15 December, 2026.
Anforderungen
Requirements
- Currently enrolled as a student at the UoC
- Excellent verbal and written English skills
- Strong interest in linguistic data and research
- Preferable but not obligatory experience in either software development (primarily Python) or data management (including databases such as MySQL)
- Strong willingness to learn new skills
Additional Skills
None of these additional skills are required. Please do not refrain from applying if you lack experience in some or all of the skills listed below. If you do have experience, please mention it in your cover letter.
- Experience in corpus linguistics (e.g., corpus compilation, annotation)
- Experience in using Git (specifically GitLab)
- Experience in applying machine learning techniques (both traditional approaches as well as deep learning) to textual data
- Experience in any of the following Python libraries and frameworks: Flask, spaCy, NetworkX, scikit-learn, transformers, PyTorch
- Knowledge of additional programming languages such as JavaScript, or R
- Experience in web development (HTML, CSS, JS)
- Experience in working with (reasonably) big data (e.g., hundreds of millions of social media posts)