Postdoc in Authority Presuppositions in Human—AI Communication project

Overview

We invite applications for a Postdoctoral Researcher position in the interdisciplinary project “Authority Presuppositions in Human—AI Communication” (APHIC) at the University of Stuttgart. The project is led by Dr. Agnieszka Faleńska [1] and Prof. Judith Tonhauser [2] under the IRIS-HISIT initiative.

Project
APHIC is part of the “Human-Intelligent Systems Interaction and Teaming” (IRIS-HISIT) programme [3] funded by the Ministry of Science, Research, and the Arts of Baden-Württemberg [4]. The project investigates authority presuppositions—implicit assumptions that an AI system has the expertise to deliver high-stakes advice (e.g., medical or legal). The project aims to (1) develop a theoretically grounded taxonomy of authority presuppositions, and (2) design and evaluate conversational repair strategies that maintain trust and informativeness while ensuring user safety.

Position
• Duration: 20 months
• Earliest start: March 2026
• Salary: TV-L 13 (100%), see [5] for details
• Environment: The researcher will be embedded in the IRIS community [6] and collaborate closely with colleagues at the Institute for Natural Language Processing [7] and the Institute of Linguistics [8].

Company:

University of Stuttgart

Qualifications:

• PhD in computational linguistics or a related field
• Familiarity with key concepts in linguistics and formal pragmatics, e.g. presuppositions
• Experience in programming, prompting LLMs, and machine learning
• Excellent communication skills and enthusiasm for interdisciplinary research

Language requirements:

• Proficiency in English (German not required)

Educational level:

Ph. D.

Tagged as: Academia, Computational Linguistics, Germany, Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, NLP, Ph. D.