Postdoctoral Research Associate in Natural Language Processing

About us

King’s College London (KCL) is an internationally renowned university for its excellence in research, education, and interdisciplinary collaboration.

The Department of Informatics at KCL is seeking to recruit a Postdoctoral Research Associate (PDRA) in Large Language Models, based in the Natural Language Processing (NLP) group. The NLP group is internationally recognised for its work on integrating machine learning with natural language understanding, including large language models, and maintains strong links to real-world applications in education, healthcare, and beyond.

About the role

Applications are invited for a Postdoctoral Research Associate (PDRA) position on the EPSRC Prosperity Partnership project ‘AI-enabled High Stakes Assessment’ jointly between King’s College London (KCL) and AQA, the largest exam board in the UK for GCSE and A-level exams. This collaborative project aims to enhance the quality of secondary school qualifications (e.g. GCSE and A-level) by developing a cutting-edge, modular AI system powered by Large Language Models (LLMs). Combining AQA's expertise in assessment with KCL's proficiency in LLMs, the project represents an interdisciplinary effort. 

Two PDRAs will be appointed for this project, one based at AQA while another at KCL. This position, based at KCL, will focus on key tasks such as improving the faithfulness of LLM reasoning in student answer assessment, integrating human cognitive theories of assessment into LLM model training, and developing meta-reasoning approaches to enable continuous LLM learning in assessment contexts. The successful candidate will collaborate closely with the AQA project team and have opportunities to build their research profile through demos, presentations, and academic publications.

Candidates should hold a PhD in Computer Science or a related discipline and demonstrate strong skills in natural language processing and large language models. Knowledge of educational theories and human-computer interaction would be advantageous. 

This is a full-time post (35 hours per week), and you will be offered a fixed-term contract for 24 months or until 17th August 2028, whichever is earlier.

Research staff at King’s are entitled to at least 10 days per year (pro-rata) for professional development. This entitlement, from the Concordat to Support the Career Development of Researchers, applies to Postdocs, Research Assistants, Research and Teaching Technicians, Teaching Fellows and AEP equivalent up to and including grade 7. Visit the Centre for Research Staff Development for more information.

About you

To be successful in this role, we are looking for candidates to have the following skills and experience:

Essential criteria

• PhD in Natural Language Processing (NLP), Artificial Intelligence or a very closely related discipline.
• Strong research tracked record in NLP and LLMs as evidenced by publications in high quality journals and top tier conferences.
• Sufficient breadth or depth of specialist knowledge in the discipline and of research methods and techniques to work within established research programmes.
• Demonstrated ability to conduct independent research.
• Good effective communication (both oral and written) skills.
• Ability to write research reports and papers accessible to both academic and lay audiences.
• Ability to work collaboratively in an interdisciplinary research environment.
• Ability to initiate, plan, organise, implement and deliver programmes of work to tight deadlines.  

Desirable criteria

• Experience with LLM alignment, reasoning, interpretability, or continual learning.
• Experience in human-in-the-loop AI or evaluation of AI systems in real-world settings.
• Ability or potential to contribute to the development of funding proposals in order to generate external funding to support research projects

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