RFP - Language AI expert on LLMs and language tech for social impact

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About the Organization

CLEAR Global helps people get vital information, and be heard, whatever language they speak. We believe that everyone has the right to give and receive information in a language and format they understand. We work with nonprofit partners and a global community of language professionals to build local language translation capacity, and raise awareness of language barriers. Our network of over 100,000 community members translate millions of words of life-saving and life-changing information a year.

About the Proposal

CLEAR Global is looking for a language technology and AI expert to conduct research into the current state of large language models (LLMs) and especially the most recent iterations of reasoning models where it matters for the application of those models for social impact in low-resourced languages. As needed, this research might also include investigations of other types of models like automatic speech recognition (ASR), text-to-speech (TTS) and machine translation (MT) models, e.g. for comparison or as complements.

Given CLEAR Global’s current involvement in the Agriculture Information Exchange Platform, one focus of this research should be on agricultural use cases. But beyond this focus, it should also consider other use cases including climate change, humanitarian response and sexual and reproductive health.

The geographic focus of the work should be primarily Africa, and potentially India and South Asia as a secondary priority.

Responsibilities

Key activities include:

Desk research: Conduct desk research into LLMs (and potential other models like ASR, TTS and MT where necessary) and especially recent advancements in reasoning models and speech capabilities, including case studies and research. Questions will need to be agreed on with CLEAR Global. Key questions to answer could include:

• How are reasoning models applied for social impact? Where do they deliver additional value and where do other models suffice?
• What are the requirements? What are the costs? How have costs developed over time?
• What are state of the art approaches to evaluate those models, especially in low-resource languages? Which evaluation datasets already exist and what are their benefits and shortcomings?
• Where might small language models work and what are their limitations?
• What are efficient methods to adapt those models for social impact use cases in low-resourced languages? What are the data and model training requirements to implement those methods?

Evaluations: Conduct independent evaluations where existing research and case studies do not answer the questions. Note: Please budget API and compute costs to conduct those studies. We expect the contractor to budget at least USD 2000 in API and compute costs.

• This can include documented simple and quick experiments as well as more structured evaluations.

In cooperation with the CLEAR Global team, design and create relevant evaluation benchmarks that can serve as quick guidance on the utility and performance of existing and new models.

• To create those benchmarks, CLEAR Global can work with the TWB (Translators without Borders) community which has access to a community of over 100,000 volunteer translators of 216 languages.

Provide inputs and review documents with relevance to the researched topics as well as contribution to other related research and project implementations where needed

Deliverables

• A report summarizing the research findings from desk research and evaluations, providing in text form and as a slide deck
• A report with recommendations, best practices and experiences for creating LLM fine-tuning and evaluation datasets for social impact use cases
• 1-2 webinars presenting the results to CLEAR Global and partners

Eligibility

The right candidate is an energetic team player, flexible and dynamic in approach, who agrees with CLEAR Global’s basic beliefs and values and who can work remotely with team members based throughout the world.

• University degree in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing or related field
• Proven experience in NLP, especially LLMs. This can be demonstrated by involvement in NLP projects, code repositories, paper authorship, other non-technical write-ups, and/or dataset/model/demo publications.
• Experience working with under-resourced languages and non-Latin writing systems
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills
• Excellent working knowledge of written and spoken English
• Passion for making a positive impact in the world

How to Apply

CLEAR Global will accept offers from individual consultants and consulting firms.

To apply for this consultancy please send the following documents:

1- A technical and financial offer to include:

• a brief description (no more than two sides of A4) of how you would tackle this role
• a proposed work plan (including the number of days required for each task)
• a financial offer, specifying daily fees. Please also state your daily fee in the ‘Desired Salary’ field in the application.
• examples and descriptions of relevant similar work are welcome.

2- Curriculum vitae highlighting experience from similar projects, as well as the contact details (email and telephone number) of at least three professional references.

Please upload the technical and financial offer as one document under “cover letter” and present the CV(s) of the expert(s) proposed in one document under “CV”.

Deadline for applications: 1 March, 2025*

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Tags Food, Agriculture and Nutrition Innovations and Technology Research Others