Research Associate/Senior Research Associate in Financial Text Analysis

Ref: A2970 
Research Associate/Senior Research Associate in Financial Text Analysis
Department: School of Computing and Communications
Salary: £28,331 - £40,322
Closing Date: 28 February 2020
Contract: Fixed Term

We are seeking a research associate or senior research associate to work on the ESRC-funded project “Analysing Narrative Aspects of UK Preliminary Announcements and Annual Reports: Tools and Insights for Researchers and Regulators”: (http://ucrel.lancaster.ac.uk/cfie/).  

The Analysing Financial Narratives project is the most recent in a series of projects conducted by a multidisciplinary team spanning the fields of accounting, finance, natural language processing, and corpus linguistics. In the projects, we have been working with important stakeholders such as the UK’s primary regulator of financial reporting and governance quality (the Financial Reporting Council (FRC), https://frc.org.uk/ ). This provides the research team with a unique opportunity to shape reporting practice at the same time as contributing to high quality academic papers targeted at top-tier journals. The research team includes internationally respected researchers in the fields of accounting (Professors Martin Walker and Steven Young) and natural language processing (Drs Paul Rayson and Mahmoud El-Haj). 

During the project, you will closely engage with staff based in the Department of Accounting and Finance at Lancaster University Management School (LUMS). The main research duties include: completing a Preliminary Earnings Announcement text extraction tool; contributing to the development of textual analysis resources for determining the quality of annual reports; evaluating more advanced topic modelling and text reuse techniques for the financial domain; contributing NLP and statistical analysis to support the drafting of ongoing papers; and contributing to the dissemination of findings to academic and professional communities. 

We invite applications from enthusiastic individuals with experience in relevant aspects of Computer Science, NLP and computational linguistics or an appropriate, related discipline. The role will require you to engage with a large group of external partners and stakeholders, and therefore you should possess excellent communication skills and demonstrate evidence of working effectively within a team. 

The School of Computing and Communications offers a highly inclusive and stimulating environment for research career development. You will join ambitious research groups in corpus-based NLP and data science that are internationally recognised, and you will be expected to contribute to the already strong profiles of the groups by participation in the development and publication of research results. 

The Research Associate position within the School of Computing and Communications (SCC) at Lancaster University is a fixed term appointment until 31 July 2020.  Informal enquiries can be made to Dr Paul Rayson, email p.rayson@lancaster.ac.uk   

We welcome applications from people in all diversity groups.