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Call for Expression of Interest

Tenure-Track Assistant Professor in Computational Linguistics (Deadline: September 14, 2025)

Computational Linguistics Principal Investigator, University of Trento, Center for Mind-Brain Sciences (CIMeC), CIMeC Language, Interaction, and Computation (CLIC) lab, Trento, Italy

The Center for Mind-Brain Sciences (CIMeC) at the University of Trento, Italy, invites expressions of interest from highly motivated scholars because of the forthcoming opening of a Tenure Track Researcher (RTT) position (if, after six years the tenure tracker will have obtained the Italian “Scientific Habilitation” for Associate Professor, they will be evaluated to obtain the Associate Professor Position at CIMeC). Candidates who already held an equivalent position for three years abroad may be directly considered for a Tenured Associate Professor position.

Profile

The ideal candidate would have a good research record in computational linguistics and the ability to conduct cognitive science research. The successful candidate will work in the CIMeC Language, Interaction, and Computation Lab  at the Center for Mind-Brain Sciences. They are expected to be interested in interacting with the rest of the CIMeC faculty on general cognitive and neurocognitive topics and to help develop cutting-edge research at the intersection between computational linguistics, theoretical linguistics, and cognitive science. Knowledge of Italian is not required at the time of application, but will be requested at the time of the six year period of Tenure Track.

The University of Trento is an equal opportunity institution. Applications from female candidates are especially encouraged. 

Teaching

The candidate is expected to contribute to the Center’s overall goal of delivering high-quality teaching in English at the PhD and MSc levels.
The position holder will receive a personal grant for research/travel expenses, along with a minimal starting package. 
Teaching duties at the MSc level vary depending on the position. Assistant professors are expected to teach 90 hours/year. 

UniTrento and CIMeC

The University of Trento has been consistently ranked among Italy's top-tier institutions in the past decade in both national Research Assessment Evaluations (RAE) and University Surveys, and has been ranked 1st among medium-sized universities in the latest RAE. The CIMeC's goal is to foster cutting-edge research on cognition and its neural underpinnings and to support the dissemination of findings internationally and within the local community. Its faculty originates from Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Israel, New Zealand, Argentina, Poland, and beyond.

In recent years, the CIMeC faculty has won numerous competitive national and international grants, including one European Research Council (ERC) advanced grant, two ERC consolidator grants, six ERC starting grants, and other European Framework grants, as well as highly competitive grants awarded by the local province. The center has recently been ranked Italy's leading cognitive neuroscience research unit.

CIMEC is in the process of merging with the Department of Psychology and Cognitive Science to form one of the biggest research and teaching structures in cognitive science in Italy.  

CIMEC is located in Rovereto, a 40K people town in the Italian Alps, 20 Km south of Trento, 100 Km north of Verona, and 18 Km from Lake Garda. Its host region, Trentino Alto Adige, consistently occupies top ranks for quality of life in Italy (Sole 24 Ore survey)

Application

Expressions of interest in English should include a brief motivation letter and CV (including a list of publications and a brief description highlighting the three most significant publications), a research statement, and a teaching statement (up to two pages each).

Informal inquiries regarding the position can be addressed to cimec.clic-lab@unitn.it, Prof. Roberto Zamparelli (roberto.zamparelli@unitn.it), or Prof. Jakub Szymanik (jakub.szymanik@unitn.it).

Expressions of interest should be addressed via email to cimec.clic-lab@unitn.it before September 14, 2025.
 

Mission

The Language, Interaction and Computation Laboratory (CLIC) is an interdisciplinary group of researchers primarily interested in studying verbal communication. Researcher groups linked to this CLIC include:

  • Theoretical linguistics and its relation to human cognition (the LiCo group): we study the role of language in various cognitive abilities, developing theoretical and computational models of human language, of how it is learned and represented in the brain, and which of its properties may be due to functional or biological constraints. We address these questions using interdisciplinary tools that include corpora research, neural network models, linguistic data collection using web games and neurolinguistic techniques;
  • Computational models of multimodality (the LaVi group): we aim at understanding multimodal communication, in which intelligent agents can converse using information received through text, images or sounds. Our research tries to understand the role of these different modalities in learning certain reasoning skills. Both the linguistic / cognitive aspects and the possible technological applications of this type of model are considered; 
  • Meaning and Computation Lab (the MCL group): we study computational processes involved in human language with particular attention to semantics: the meaning of quantification in natural language, logical reasoning, and explaining cross-linguistic similarities between languages. We use various complexity measures to understand the difficulty of core cognitive abilities, such as language learning, comprehension, or reasoning. Our approach is characterized by a mixture of formal (logic, computational modeling, simulations) and empirical (neurobehavioral experiments, corpus linguistics) methods.
  • Human-aware Machine Intelligence (the HAMI group): we study how to ensure artificial agents are aligned with their users and can fruitfully collaborate with them. This involves developing AIs that can learn from data, reason according to symbolic knowledge, interactively request and provide information, understand the instructions they are given, and explain their reasoning to human stakeholders. 
  • DEep Neural ArtificiaL Intelligence (the DENALI group): This focuses on computer vision, particularly in the areas of language and vision, zero-shot classification, temporal action localization, and visual instruction tuning. The laboratory aims to develop advanced visual intelligence systems by bridging the gap between natural language processing and computer vision, recognizing and categorizing unfamiliar objects, accurately detecting and locating actions in video streams, and developing intelligent systems that can learn from human instructions and perform complex tasks accurately.

Resources

We provide open-access datasets and software on our Wiki page.

Services offered

In addition to a CPU cluster, the CLIC has eight NVDIA GPUs at its disposal. For instructions, see the server wiki page.

People 

Contacts 

CLIC is situated in Palazzo Fedrigotti, corso Bettini 31, 38068 Rovereto (Tn). For any inquiry send an email to the cimec.clic-lab@unitn.it

Links

We collaborate with the Center for Language Studies.
We are a partner in the European Masters Program in Language & Communication Technologies.