** Apologies for cross-posting **

Applications are invited for a fully funded PhD candidature in at Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science (LIACS), The Netherlands, on the use of Formal Methods to enhance the efficiency, transparency and the understanding of Transformer-based language models.

While large language models (LLMs) have proven successful in many areas of Natural Language Processing, they suffer from high data and resource usage, and display limited generalization capacity in tasks that humans excel at. In this PhD project you will have the opportunity to investigate how formal methods can help in developing more efficient and more transparent models for Natural Language Understanding. Specifically, you will investigate the use of implicit or explicit structural bias in Transformer-based language models to reduce training data and model parameters; additionally, you will look at novel techniques for evaluating models for their generalization capabilities on Natural Language Understanding tasks such as Natural Language Inference, possibly in a multilingual and multimodal setting.

The specific project content is to be decided between the applicants’ interest and the expertise of the supervisor, dr. Gijs Wijnholds.

Topics include (but are not limited to):

- Using logical methods to define task-relevant constraints on LLM finetuning; - Incorporating structured representations in regularized training of smaller language models; - Assessing the generalization capacity of Transformer-based models in the context of formal language theory, model probing, Natural Language Inference; - Evaluation of Natural Language Understanding models in the presence of ambiguity and/or annotator disagreement; - Understanding multilingual Natural Language Inference in Vision-Language Models;

For the official vacancy text, please see https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/vacancies/2023/qw4/23-81914335phd-candi...

The application deadline is January 13, 2024. The ideal starting date is in March 2024, but can be negotiated depending on circumstances.

For further information feel free to reach out to dr. Gijs Wijnholds (g.j.wijnholds@liacs.leidenuniv.nlmailto:g.j.wijnholds@liacs.leidenuniv.nl).

dr. Gijs Wijnholds Assistant Professor in Natural Language Processing Text Mining and Retrieval Grouphttps://tmr.liacs.nl/ Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science https://gijswijnholds.github.io