[apologies for cross-postings]

the Department of Interpreting and Translation of University of Università di Bologna [1] is offering one fully-paid three-year PhD grant in the program “Translation, Interpreting, and Intercultural Studies”, starting in November 2025. Besides the monthly stipend, the PhD programme guarantees additional economic support for a 6 to 12 months internship abroad.

Project description. LLMs (e.g., Llama, deepseek, Gemini, chatGPT) have turned into pervasive services faster than hardly any previous technology around the world. Still, the quality of their output is highly imbalanced between English and other languages. Despite their successful handling of many complex linguistic tasks, LLMs have a hard time dealing with regional concepts and realia for which not enough data exist online. The PhD should focus on... (a) measuring the level (or lack) of local cultural knowledge by LLMs in multiple languages, (b) measuring the influence of English in LLM-produced texts, both from a linguistic and a cultural point of view, in applications such as machine translation, dialogue and text generation, and (c) designing and implementing strategies to produce and publish high-quality multicultural data and incorporate them in LLMs to boost their local awareness. We focus especially on (Italian) gastronomy.

We welcome candidates with relevant backgrounds in natural language processing, digital humanities, and/or translation/linguistics, among others. We encourage students with programming and machine learning skills.

For expressions of interest and informal discussion, please contact Prof. Alberto Barrón-Cedeño [2].

For the official application process, please visit:

- https://www.unibo.it/en/study/phd-professional-masters-specialisation-school... (in English) - https://www.unibo.it/it/studiare/dottorati-master-specializzazioni-e-altra-f... (in Italian)

(the “official” title of the project is “On  the treatment of local cultural concepts by large language models and the societal impact of pervasive Artificial Intelligence”)

The student will depart from ongoing work within projects !Translate [3], GastroWiki [4] and GIARA. (S)he will also interact with an ongoing PhD research on NLP applied to gastronomy [5,6], and will join a growing research group with four professors (covering disciplines across computer science and linguistics) and four 2nd- and 3rd-year PhD students.

Timeline, all in 2025: - 1st of July: application deadline (notice that the application includes a project proposal, prepared by the applicant). - 1st week of July: short-listing of the best applicants and invitation to oral interviews - Mid July: oral interviews with the commission (in presence or online) - End of July: publication of the final decision - 1st of November: the PhD starts.

[1] https://dit.unibo.it [2] https://www.unibo.it/sitoweb/a.barron/en ; https://aclanthology.org/people/a/alberto-barron-cedeno/ [3] https://site.unibo.it/no-translate/en [4] https://site.unibo.it/gastrowiki/ [5] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306457325001360 [6] https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3878/46_main_long.pdf

Best regards, Alberto Barrón-Cedeño