Research Assistant (NLP - Singapore Mandarin Usage Dictionary)

About the role

The School of Humanities at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) is looking for a full-time Research Assistant with a background in Natural Language Processing to support the technical work of the MOE SSHR Thematic Grant project, the Singapore Mandarin Usage Dictionary. The role focuses on corpus construction, including speech-to-text processing and transcription of spoken corpora, and on training, fine-tuning and evaluating computational models such as Word2Vec and BERT to identify lexical variation and region-specific features in Singapore Mandarin. The position is based in Singapore, works closely with the Principal Investigator, Co-PI and collaborators, and is offered on an initial contract of 18 to 24 months.

Key responsibilities

• Support corpus construction, including speech-to-text processing and transcription of spoken corpora
• Perform data preprocessing, cleaning and quality checks on written and spoken corpus data
• Contribute to the training, fine-tuning and evaluation of computational models (e.g. Word2Vec, BERT)
• Implement models and carry out systematic performance evaluation
• Prepare model outputs for linguistic validation and dictionary integration
• Contribute to the technical development of the online dictionary platform, including database integration and search functions
• Document code, workflows and datasets, and support other project-related tasks as assigned

Required profile

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Computational Linguistics, Natural Language Processing or a related field
• Technical hands-on experience in NLP or machine learning, including model training, fine-tuning and evaluation
• Familiarity with NLP models and toolkits (e.g. Word2Vec, BERT) and with speech-to-text workflows
• Good written and oral communication skills, and proficiency in Mandarin Chinese to support the grant project
• Ability to work independently and collaboratively, with attention to detail and good organisational skills

Required skills

• Proficiency in Python and common machine learning / NLP libraries (e.g. PyTorch, scikit-learn)
• NLP model training and evaluation