Research Associate (Applied Linguistics)

We are a world class research-intensive university. We deliver teaching and learning of the highest quality. We play a leading role in economic, social and cultural development of the North East of England. Attracting and retaining high-calibre people is fundamental to our continued success.

The Role
We are recruiting a Research Associate to work for 8 months at 0.6 FTE (three days per week) on an Innovate UK-funded research project. The project is a collaboration between our team at Newcastle University, teams at two partner universities, and a digital health startup who have developed a conversational AI agent for healthcare consultations.

The Newcastle University strand of the project will involve using a Conversation Analysis research approach to (1) identify effective communicative practices used by human clinicians when conducting telephone clinical consultations with patients, (2) train a Large Language Model to incorporate these practices into its own conversations, and (3) examine the efficacy of the LLM-powered clinical conversations by analysing test calls with human users.

See the ECLS website for more information about the team and the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences, including our Applied Linguistics & Communication subject area and Multimodal Analysis Research Group.

You, who should have a PhD in a relevant discipline, will be responsible for management and processing of existing audio data. This will include liaising with the partner company about access to data, transcription of data using Conversation Analysis transcription conventions, and analysis of data in collaboration with the Newcastle University research team. You will also be actively involved in writing and dissemination of provisional research outcomes, for example for academic conferences, and in engagement beyond academic audiences via workshops and other activities.

Informal enquiries are welcome. Please contact Dr Adam Brandt (adam.brandt@newcastle.ac.uk) to discuss the role.

Qualifications

• PhD in relevant discipline (e.g., applied linguistics, linguistics, sociology).

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