The Language Technology Group at the Department of Informatics, University of Oslo, invites applications for a 3-year PhD research fellowship in Natural Language Processing.

The PhD project will focus on variety-aware machine translation in a broad sense. While there have been impressive improvements in the field of machine translation in recent years, most systems define their source and target languages at a relatively coarse level (e.g. “English”, “Norwegian”) and do not take into account different types of variation that exist within these language denominations: national varieties (e.g. American vs. British English), writing forms (e.g. Bokmål vs. Nynorsk), dialects, historical varieties, learner language, simple/plain language, as well as different genres and styles.

Applicants have considerable freedom to define their research project within the area of variety-aware machine translation. Depending on the chosen variation type, different setups can be explored (variation on the source side, variation on the target side, or translation between two varieties of the same language). The research project should not only produce variety-aware machine translation models, but also contribute to the evaluation of such models. The application should contain a research proposal that specifies the research direction that the applicant wishes to take.

The LTG ( https://www.mn.uio.no/ifi/english/research/groups/ltg/ ) is an international and diverse group with a heavily machine-learning oriented research profile combined with an interest for linguistic analysis and knowledge. The LTG currently participates in the EU-funded HPLT project ( https://hplt-project.org/ ), one of whose goals is to provide large datasets for training language and translation models. The LTG is also an active member of Integreat ( https://www.integreat.no/ ), the Norwegian center of excellence for knowledge-driven machine learning. The group has access to excellent high-performance computing infrastructure.

The application deadline is 29 February 2024. Further details about the position and application requirements can be found here: https://www.jobbnorge.no/en/available-jobs/job/257218/phd-research-fellow-in...

For further information about the position and the application process, please contact Associate Professor Yves Scherrer: yves.scherrer@ifi.uio.no mailto:yves.scherrer@ifi.uio.no