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Apologies for cross-posting.

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The Language and Dialogue Technologies (LanD) group at Fondazione Bruno Kessler https://www.fbk.eu/en/ (Trento, Italy) in conjunction with the ICT International Doctorate School of the University of Trento https://iecs.unitn.it/ is pleased to announce the availability of the following fully-funded PhD position:

*TITLE*: Strategies for improving Neural Dialogue Models generation

*DESCRIPTION*: Conversational agents are experiencing a surge in interest given the continuous release of new models and the ever evolving scenario of NLG. Still, the actual focus is mainly on model size, training data size and prompt engineering. The interaction of these elements with related aspects, such as decoding strategies, knowledge guided generation, data quality, knowledge distillation -just to mention a few- can help in improving the models, especially for better factuality, reducing hallucination and increasing coherence among dialogue turns. The goal of this PhD Thesis is to overcome the shortcomings of present large language models by incorporating novel strategies for better generation.

*Link to the call*: https://iecs.unitn.it/education/admission/reserved-topic-scholarships#A7

*CONTACTS*: guerini@fbk.eu, jacopo.staiano@unitn.it

*COMPLETE DETAILS AVAILABLE AT*: https://iecs.unitn.it/education/admission/call-for-application

*IMPORTANT DATES:* The deadline for application is May 30, 2023, hrs. 04:00 PM (CEST)

*FURTHER INFORMATION: *For preliminary interviews, and should you need further information about the position, please contact Marco Guerini ( guerini@fbk.eu) and Jacopo Staiano (jacopo.staiano@unitn.it).

Best Regards,

Marco Guerini