(apologies for cross posting)
The HiTZ center (https://hitz.ehu.eus) has received several large multiyear grants to advance research in all aspects of NLP and Language Technologies, with a focus on Large Language Models, common sense, cross-lingual evaluation and low-resource languages, covering all modalities including text, speech, images and videos. The center will be offering a number of PhD, post-doctoral and research engineer positions shortly with relatively flexible starting dates. Please contact us if interested.
HiTZ is a reference research center on Language Technologies. Its aim is to promote research, training, technological transfer and innovation in Artificial Intelligence focused on language and speech. HiTZ is a leader in research in Spain. It holds, among other, two Spanish Research Awards in Computer Science, one of the 15 fellows that the main professional association in the area (Association for Computational Linguistics) has in Europe, and the award for the beTwo fully-funded 4-year PhD positions at the HiTZ center, in the Basque Countryst PhD thesis in Artificial Intelligence in Europe (EurAI 2020). The center is part of the University of the Basque Country (https://ehu.eus), one of the top 400 universities in the world according to the Shanghai ranking. The center has offices in San Sebastian and Bilbao (Basque Country, Spain), two cities which rank at the top of places-to-visit and happiness rankings.
This message is specifically about two fully-funded positions that need to be filled quickly.
The recipients of these PhD positions will be awarded a fully-funded four-year scholarship, as well as additional funding for the payment of doctoral tuition fees and research stays abroad. The PhD theses will be carried out in the framework of the TRAIN (EXTREMELY LOW-RESOURCED MACHINE TRANSLATION) and DeepKnowledge (DEEP LANGUAGE MODELS FOR UNDERSTANDING AND REASONING WITH MULTILINGUAL CONTENT) projects.
The TRAIN project will explore techniques for machine translation between languages with very scarce resources, including multimodal translation from Spanish Sign Language (LSE) to written Spanish.
The main research objective of DeepKnowledge consists in advancing the state-of-the-art towards NLU and NLG by generating and exploiting new language models by taking into account a multitask and multimodal objective during the pre-training, as well as exploring novel ways to exploiting new large language models.
The official deadline for the two FPI pre-doctoral grants is 26 January, but contact us asap if interested (https://www.ehu.eus/es/web/ikerketaren-kudeaketa/-/fpi-2022). If you are interested in these two positions (or any of the future positions), please send your CV and academic transcript to Gorka Labaka (gorka.labaka@ehu.eus).