PhD scholarship (4-years) in Natural Language Processing: Text Generation with applications to the Generation of Accessible Content - Start date 1/10/2025

Deadline for applications: 30/4/2025

The TALN (Natural Language Processing) Research Group in Barcelona (Spain) is looking for a PhD student in the area of text generation with applications to text simplification and text style adaptation to accessible language among others adopting current and future developments in Deep Learning paradigms (e.g. Large Language Models) as backbones.

The student will join a dynamic, creative, and collaborative research team under the guidance of Prof. Horacio Saggion, head of the TALN research group. The student will be encouraged to collaborate with researchers involved in the Horizon Europe projects iDEM and IDEAL in the areas of Democracy and Inclusion.

The candidate will benefit from a scholarship (PIPF1) for four years, plus social benefits (national health insurance) and 4 weeks annual leave.

Current salaries for this position are as follows:

First year compensation €18180,49 gross salary

Second year compensation €18180,49 gross salary

Third year compensation €19479,14 gross salary

Fourth year compensation €24348,78 gross salary

The selected candidate for the scholarship must be admitted to the PhD program of the Department of Engineering at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona.

Under the scholarship, the selected candidate will teach 45 hours per year in subjects related to the Engineering degrees offered by the School of Engineering which the candidate is confident with.

The selected candidate will benefit from participation in dissemination events such as conferences, workshops, tutorials or summer schools depending on the availability of funding and on the capability of the student to produce publishable research output.

The candidate should have a Bachelor degree in Computer Science (or related fields) and a Master degree in Natural Language Processing (NLP) or Computational Linguistics. She/he should have demonstrated experience in research (experimentation, software coding, paper writing,presentation of research, etc.) with current methods in NLP such as Large Language Models and machine learning in tasks such as summarization, simplification, text generation, etc. She/he should have excellent knowledge of English. Knowledge of Spanish, Catalan, Italian or other languages is a plus.

The PhD program has the following deadlines for application:

https://www.upf.edu/web/doctorats/calendari-de-preinscripcio

The candidates are encouraged to contact Prof. Horacio Saggion well before applying for the PhD program (horacio.saggion@upf.edu) before 30/4/2025.

The TALN group Web page is: https://www.upf.edu/web/taln

The Department Web page: https://www.upf.edu/web/etic

The candidate is encouraged to visit the Web page of the PhD program to learn more about requirements to apply for a PhD:

https://www.upf.edu/en/web/doctorats/tecnologies-de-la-informacio-i-les-comu...