Starting from May 2026, the Data & Knowledge Engineering group at the Computer Science department at Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf (https://www.cs.hhu.de/lehrstuehle-und-arbeitsgruppen/data-knowledge-engineer...), affiliated with the Heine Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Science (HeiCAD) (https://www.heicad.hhu.de/) is looking for a
*PhD student– Information Extraction & Natural Language Processing* (Salary group 13 TV-L, working time 100%, initially limited to 36 months with the possibility of further extension)
In the context of the research project "WIEGE", we will investigate the spread of claims and political narratives across different social media platforms in an interdisciplinary consortium involving researchers from Communication Science, Computational Social Science and Computer Science. Our research will be concerned with novel Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods for the detection, linking and classification of claims and narratives in online discourse data. Challenges arise from the heterogeneous nature of different data sources, therefore the development of generalizable approaches will be a key focus. The PhD student will work in close collaboration with our project partners from Communication Science, benefitting from their tailored expert annotations and, vice-versa, aiding their annotation efforts by providing semi-automatic labeling approaches. Another task will entail the modeling and publishing of generated data according to Semantic Web principles.
Your tasks will be: ******************* * Research in fields such as NLP, Machine Learning, Language Modeling and Representation learning, specifically with the aim to extract structured information from online discourse data * Develop NLP methods for (i) the detection and classification of claims and narratives on social media, and (ii) linking related claims and narratives within and across data sources; further (iii) assist semi-automated data annotations and (iv) model and publish data according to Semantic Web standards * Writing, publishing and presenting project results * Collaboration with team members and project partners in an interdisciplinary consortium
Your profile: ************** * University degree (diploma/MSc) in Computer Science, Computational Linguistics or related fields * Research interests in NLP, machine learning, data mining, large language models, Semantic Web * Hands-on experience with Python, including knowledge of ML-Frameworks such as TensorFlow and PyTorch * Ability to communicate fluently in English (mandatory), good knowledge of the German language (desirable)
What we offer: *************** * Flexible working hours and home office arrangements * A fast growing and international working environment with a lot of creative scientific freedom * Access to unique research data, (social) web archives and behavioral data * Support of collaborations with international research labs and experts
The PhD research will be supervised by Prof. Dr. Stefan Dietze (Professor for Data & Knowledge Engineering at HHU and Scientific Director of KTS at GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, Cologne), mentored by Dr. Katarina Boland (Postdoctoral Researcher at Data & Knowledge Engineering and HeiCAD).
For further information please contact Stefan Dietze (stefan.dietze@hhu.de) and/or Katarina Boland (katarina.boland@hhu.de).
Interested? ************* Please apply by sending your complete application documents as a single PDF file to katarina.boland@hhu.de by 01 April 2026.