PhD position in computational sociolinguistics

Social media such as Twitter propose new expression channels in which speakers use language varieties that differ from standard spoken or written forms. These varieties exhibit a high innovation rate and large inter-speaker and inter-communities variabilities. Moreover, social media give access to amounts of data, both linguistic and social, inconceivable just a few years ago. The goal of this PhD is to study the variety of French observed on Twitter from a sociolinguistic point of view, i.e. by determining how the properties of the underlying social network shape the linguistic variability. As the traditional sociolinguistic methods are not designed to cope with large amounts of digital data, computational approaches will have to be adopted.

 

This PhD is part of a large interdisciplinary project involving linguists, computer scientists and network scientists. The PhD student will be based at the ENS of lyon, in the ICAR lab (icar.univ-lyon2.fr), and will work in close collaboration with the Inria-DANTE team (team.inria.fr/dante/).

 

Candidates are expected to have a background in linguistics/computer science. A good knowledge of French is a prerequisite. Applications are due before june 30th and should consist of a cover letter, a CV and at least one recommendation letter. The PhD is founded for 3 years by the Aslan labex (aslan.universite-lyon.fr). For further information or application contact Jean-Philippe Magué (jean-philippe.mague@ens-lyon.fr)