[apologies for cross-postings]

Within the initiatives of the Piano Nazionale di Ripresa e Resilienza (National Recovery and Resilience Plan), the Department of Interpreting and Translation of University of Bologna [1] has secured funds for a fully-paid three-year PhD grant in the program on “Translation, Interpreting, and Intercultural Studies” starting in November 2023.

The topic of the PhD grant is the automatic generation of definitional contexts across languages to boost the comprehensibility of complex terms. The project has special focus on (Italian) gastronomy. We welcome candidates with relevant backgrounds in natural language processing, digital humanities, and/or computing science. We encourage students with programming skills and knowledge of machine learning approaches to natural language processing.

For the official application process, please visit

- https://www.unibo.it/en/teaching/phd/2023-2024/translation-interpreting-and-... (in English) - https://www.unibo.it/it/didattica/dottorati/2023-2024/traduzione-interpretaz... (in Italian)

(the “official” title of the project is “Machine Translation for Italian Intangible Heritage”)

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

The student will depart from ongoing work within projects !Trans and GastroWiki. (S)he will work together with another student carrying out her/his own PhD research on a comparative study of Italian and Chinese gastronomy and will join a growing research group with four professors (covering disciplines across computer science and linguistics) and five 2nd- and 3rd-year PhD students.

Approximate timeline, all in 2023 (could vary): End of May: publication of the official call for applications 20th of June: application deadline (notice that the application includes a project proposal, prepared by the applicant). End of June: short-listing of the best applicants and invitation to oral interviews Early-July: oral interviews with the commision (in presence or online) Mid-July: publication of the final decision November 1st: 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/

Best regards, Alberto Barrón-Cedeño