The Images and Contents team [1] of the L3i lab [2] at La Rochelle University invites applications for a fully-funded PhD POSITION.

Application deadline: 21/04/2025

Detection, Representation and Visualisation of Event-Event Relations

Understanding how events relate to each other is at the heart of narrative comprehension, whether in literature, news discourse, historical analysis, or AI-driven storytelling. The ability to detect, represent, and visualize explicit and implicit event-event relations is crucial for making sense of complex narratives, identifying causal structures, and uncovering hidden patterns in temporal or logical sequences. This research will explore machine learning approaches, structured knowledge graphs, and multimodal visual representations to model event-event relations effectively. The project will leverage AI to tackle four core challenges: (1) accurate detection of implicit and explicit event-event relations across diverse textual sources, (2) structured representation of these relationships using knowledge graphs and semantic models, (3) linking of event sequences with relevant background knowledge, and (4) intuitive visualization of event interactions to enhance interpretability and facilitate narrative analysis.

What we offer: A yearly scholarship of €40,000 is provided for the entire duration of enrollment, up to a maximum of 36 months. Funded within the framework of a Junior Professorship (CPJ) on Federating Digital Humanities, this PhD offers strong interdisciplinary and collaborative research opportunities with Digital Humanities and Computer Science researchers.

Eligibility: Master’s degree in Computer Science, Computational Linguistics, Information Retrieval, Data Science or a related field. Strong interest or prior experience in NLP, knowledge graphs, semantic technologies, or interactive data visualization.

Mode of study: Full time

Year of entry: 2025

Duration: 3 years

Additional criteria: Applicants must not already (i) hold a doctoral degree; or (ii) be matriculated for a doctoral degree at La Rochelle University, or another institution.

Expression of Interest (EOI): Students are to submit their EOIs to Georgeta Bordea (name.surname@univ-lr.fr) including the following documents:

* CV including information about publications.

* Transcripts of most relevant/recent degrees.

* To apply, applicants must submit an EOI detailing their suitability for the project by addressing the required skills and key responsibilities in under 800 words.

[1] https://l3i.univ-larochelle.fr/Images-et-contenus [https://l3i.univ-larochelle.fr/Images-et-contenus]

[2] https://l3i.univ-larochelle.fr/ [https://l3i.univ-larochelle.fr/]