Postdoctoral Researcher in Computational Social Science (NLP & Machine Learning) Koç University in Turkey

Koç University in Istanbul, Türkiye is offering a full-time postdoctoral researcher position in Computational Social Science (NLP & Machine Learning) within the Department of International Relations. The post sits in the ERC-funded project EMERGEPOL (“Emerging Issues and the Dynamics of Affective Polarization”), which examines how newly emerging political issues become salient, are framed by elites and media, and can fuel affective polarization across different national contexts.

The successful candidate will help build the project’s multilingual text-as-data and forecasting backbone. The main research tasks include developing multilingual NLP pipelines for Turkish, Hungarian, Dutch, and English corpora; tracking issue emergence across parliamentary debates, manifestos, news media, and social platforms; building sentiment, moral-framing, and semantic-polarization measures; constructing network-based features from text-linked interaction data; and developing machine-learning models to forecast the “polarization potential” of emerging issues. The role also contributes to the project’s Polarization Potential Index (PPI) and its web-based dissemination tool.

This is an interdisciplinary position connecting political science, computational social science, NLP, machine learning, network analysis, survey research, and Bayesian modelling. The project is comparative and transnational, with team members working on Ireland, the Netherlands, Hungary, and Türkiye. Koç University will serve as the home base, with possible collaboration and research stays across project teams.

Applicants should hold a PhD, or be very close to completion, in computational social science, computer science, data science, computational linguistics, or political science with strong computational methods. Strong Python skills, experience with large text corpora, reproducible pipelines, and NLP/ML methods are expected, along with fluency in English and attention to research ethics and GDPR requirements. Experience with one or more of the project languages is an advantage, as are skills in social-media data collection, graph neural networks, or temporal models.

The appointment is initially for three years and may be renewed for a further two years following positive evaluation. The position includes a competitive salary, social benefits, and a dedicated research budget covering computing, data acquisition, fieldwork, and international conference travel. The planned start date is 1 January 2027, or as soon as possible thereafter. Applications are due by 2026-11-30.

To apply, candidates should use Koç University’s online application system and submit a CV with publication list and referee contacts, a motivation letter, an English writing sample, and a short project statement. Informal enquiries can be sent to Prof. Ali Çarkoğlu at [email protected].