Postdoctoral Researcher in Causal Inference and Language Technology

Linköpings Universitet · plný úvazek

Norrköping, Švédsko

We have the strength of over 50,000 students and employees. Students who give hope for the future. Employees who every day contribute to Linköping University meeting the challenges of our time. Our values are rooted in credibility, trust and security. By being bold, thinking freely and innovating, we together create—through big and small actions—a better future. Welcome to apply for a job with us! Your Tasks You will join the research project Countering Bias in AI Methods in the Social Sciences, a collaboration between the Institute for Analytical Sociology (IAS) at Linköping University and the Department of Computer Science and Engineering (CSE) at Chalmers University of Technology, funded by WASP-HS. The position is located at IAS. The project is at the intersection of causal inference and language technology (natural language processing, NLP). A central challenge when drawing causal conclusions from observational data is adjusting for other contextual factors (confounders). In the social sciences, these factors are often not directly measured but instead documented in unstructured text. Using text to adjust for these factors is promising, but it presents a particular risk we call treatment leakage: when the text also contains information about treatment assignment, conditioning on the text can bias the causal estimate. Your task is to collaborate with our team at CSE, who lead the method development, and then apply their methods to applied social science research questions. The methods enable researchers to use text data for causal inference while detecting and removing this source of bias. The work combines modern language technology with causal estimation. Current directions in the project include using large language models to remove treatment-predictive information from text, evaluating and comparing estimators that correct for bias, such as Design-based Supervised Learning and Prediction-Powered Inference, and applying techniques for mechanistic interpretability, such as sparse feature circuits and the SHIFT method, so that text classifiers disregard features associated with treatment assignment. You will help shape the research direction, lead your own studies, publish in leading scientific forums, and work closely with the project team, including serving as co-advisor to the project's doctoral student and collaborating with partners at University of Texas at Austin. Your primary focus will be on applying these methods to the effect of development projects in Africa. Secondarily on similar causal problems. As a postdoctoral researcher, you will primarily conduct research. Teaching may also be included in your duties, but no more than one-fifth of your time. Your Qualifications To be eligible for employment as a postdoctoral researcher, you must have a doctoral degree or a foreign degree assessed as equivalent to a doctoral degree. Your degree must be completed by the time the employment decision is made. It is meritorious if your degree was completed no more than three years before the application deadline for this position. If there are special circumstances, it may be considered if your doctoral degree was completed earlier, for example due to various types of statutory leave. We are seeking someone with a doctoral degree in social science or computational social science, or in a related quantitative field, as well as solid programming skills, for example in Python or R. You are also welcome to apply if your degree is in applied statistics, data science, machine learning or language technology with a focus on AI for Social Good or similar. Very good English skills in speaking and writing are a requirement, as the project is conducted in an international research environment. We also believe you have solid expertise in at least one of the project's two pillars—causal inference or language technology—as well as a genuine interest in combining the two. Experience with any of the following is highly meritorious: causal inference with observational data, text as data, large language models, mechanistic interpretability, or semiparametric and design-based estimation. Publications in leading scientific forums within social science, machine learning, language technology, statistics or computational social science are highly meritorious. You are an independent and collaborative researcher who enjoys working across disciplinary boundaries, takes independent responsibility for a research agenda, and communicates clearly with both data scientists and social scientists. Your Workplace You will work at the Institute for Analytical Sociology (IAS), which you can read more about here: https://liu.se/organisation/liu/iei/ias. At IAS you will join Professor Adel Daoud's research group, which works on artificial intelligence and causal inference for the social sciences, in close collaboration with the Data Science and AI division at Chalmers. About the Position This is a fixed-term employment for two years with the possibility of extension for a combined employment period of no more than three years. The postdoctoral position is full-time. Start date by agreement. A security check may be conducted before an employment decision is made. Salary and Benefits Linköping University applies individual and differentiated salary determination in accordance with current collective agreements (RALS/RALS-T) and the university's guidelines for salary formation. Read more about benefits for employees: https://liu.se/jobba-pa-liu/formaner Trade Union Representatives For information about trade union representatives, see https://liu.se/jobba-pa-liu/hjalp-for-sokande. Application You apply for this position by clicking the "Apply" button below. Your application must be received by Linköping University no later than September 24, 2026. Applications received after the application deadline will not be considered. We welcome applicants with different backgrounds, experiences and perspectives; this enriches and develops our activities. For us, it is self-evident to uphold the equal worth, rights and opportunities of all. Read about our work here: https://liu.se/artikel/lika-villkor/. We look forward to receiving your application! Linköping University has procurement agreements and requests that we do not receive direct contact from staffing and recruitment companies or sellers of job advertisements.