PhD positions in NLP

The positions are not bound to a specific project, which will allow us some freedom to
find a project that is interesting to everyone involved.
The long-term goal of my research is to use language models of any size to
investigate long-standing questions in linguistics about the abstraction levels and
mechanisms of language, how they are similar across languages but also different in
each one, and how they evolved. Language models can be used as simulations of
language learning, and by studying how they learn and then process language, we
can gain insights into how language could work, and then compare that to human
behavioural data.
In the short term, this will require that we build better evaluations so that we can
quantify to which degree a language model has acquired a particular language and
compare against other models and languages, especially low-resource languages
which are often structurally very different from the high-resource languages for
which evaluations are already available. It will also require better interpretability
methods so that we can not only quantify how well a phenomenon is learned, but also
compare the mechanism used by the language model against different hypotheses of
human language learning.
For a better understanding of my research interests, you can also check out my
Google Scholar profile and my website.
PhD students will be able to take advantage of a large international network of
collaborators, and we will arrange a research stay abroad for several months for each
student at some point during their PhD, with a host appropriate for their research
topics. There are also interesting opportunities for local collaborations, for example
with the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

Company:

Leipzig University

Qualifications:

Ideal PhD candidates have a master’s degree in computational linguistics, computer science or a related discipline, a strong interest in natural language processing and language, excellent mathematical and programming skills and are team players. Knowledge of German is a plus, but not required. However, strong written and spoken English skills are essential. International applicants can find more information on doing a PhD in Germany here (provided by the Federal Government) and specific to Leipzig here. Leipzig University is strongly committed to diversity and especially welcomes applications from members of underrepresented groups

Educational level:

Master Degree

Tagged as: Academia, Computational Linguistics, Germany, Language Modeling, Master Degree, Natural Language Processing, NLP