Anna Rogers anna.gld@gmail.com 10:36 AM (2 hours ago) to Corpora

The Department of Computer Science at the IT University of Copenhagen is offering a PhD position in Natural Language Processing/Computational Linguistics*,* with a start date of *1 September 2024*. The *application deadline is 1**5* *April** 2024.* Applications for the position can be submitted via ITU job portal https://candidate.hr-manager.net/ApplicationInit.aspx?cid=119&ProjectId=181678&DepartmentId=3439&MediaId=5 .

*Proposed project title: *Linguistic competence of language models in prompt interpretation and text generation

*Proposed project description.* Recent generative systems based on pre-trained language models are remarkably fluent when generating even relatively exotic kinds of text, such as limericks or texts in early middle English. At the same time, they remain sensitive to slight variation in the wording of the prompts.

The proposed project will investigate this difference in competence for different linguistic phenomena when the model interprets its instructions (prompts) and generates text in response to prompts. *The specific focus of the project is negotiable*, it could be syntactic constructions, variations in lexical semantics, text registers etc. Model competence will be assessed with respect to analysis of its pre-training data (hence, an open-source model will be used).

The ideal candidate would have a strong background in computational linguistics, as well as core skills in programming in Python and machine learning. For entering the PhD program in Denmark, a M.Sc. or equivalent degree is required. For this position, it is also possible to start as a Master student, if extra ECTs are needed (for students who currently have 60-115 MA ECTS).

The successful candidate will be a member of the national Pioneer Centre for Artificial Intelligence https://aicentre.dk/, a 5-university Danish research endeavor, and of the NLPnorth https://nlpnorth.github.io/research group at the IT University’s Computer Science Department. Both the centre and research group are highly international and well-funded, working on a broad range of research topics.

The project will be co-supervised by Associate Professors Anna Rogers https://annargrs.github.io/ (arog@itu.dk) and Rob van der Goot https://robvanderg.github.io/ (robv@itu.dk), to whom inquiries about the project can be directed.

-- Anna Rogers Associate Professor IT University of Copenhagen http://annargrs.github.io/