The Natural Language Processing Section at the Department of Computer Science at University of Copenhagen is advertising for two Ph.D Fellowships in Natural Language Processing. The positions are funded by both the Pixel-based Encoding of Language project, which is financed by the Velux Foundations, and the Democratize Trustworthy and Efficient Large Language Model Technology for Europe project funded by the European Union.

The overall goal of the research is to develop and evaluate language models that can process any written language by rendering text as images, which allows the models to learn from the visual similarities between written languages. Realizing this goal includes creating and implementing tokenization-free multilingual language models, the collection and curation of visually diverse language data, the training of small-scale and large-scale models, developing techniques for effective model quantization and compression, creating models that jointly process natural images and rendered text using a single interface, and the evaluation of such models. Your research will contribute to many aspects of this process and require detailed hands-on implementation and evaluation of cutting-edge machine learning models. Further information about the projects are available at https://veluxfoundations.dk/en/about/projects-granted#/0066700000uJIZZAA4 and https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101135671.

The successful candidates will join the Language and Multimodal Processing group, which is part of a section with a strong, international, and diverse environment for research within core as well as emerging topics in natural language processing, natural language understanding, computational linguistics and multi-modal language processing. It is housed within the main Science Campus, which is centrally located in Copenhagen. Further information about the group is available here: https://lampgroup.github.io/ and further information about research at the Department is available here: https://di.ku.dk/english/research/.

The application deadline is 29 February 2024, with an expected start date of 1 June 2024, or as soon as possible thereafter. Further information about the position can be found here: https://employment.ku.dk/faculty/?show=160979

Informal enquiries about the positions can be made to Assistant Professor Desmond Elliott, Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen, e-mail: de@di.ku.dk.