PhD position on representations of knowledge in multilingual language models (start: September 2024)

The University of Zurich seeks qualified candidates for a PhD student position in the field of Natural Language Processing to work under the supervision of Rico Sennrich on multilingual large language models.

The successful candidate will be expected to conduct research on how multilingual language models represent knowledge. Specifically, they will study the conditions under which language models learn cross-lingual representations of world knowledge that give rise to cross-lingual transfer. In addition, they will use and develop interpretability methods to achieve methodological progress in disentangling world knowledge and linguistic knowledge in language models. The project will also have access to neuroimaging data to test how well language models can predict brain activity of bilinguals.

The position will be part of the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) Evolving Language, a Swiss consortium with the ambitious goal of creating a new discipline, Evolutionary Language Science, that targets the past and future of language. The consortium consists of leading scientists from traditionally separated academic domains, which allows us to harvest the diverse expertise from the humanities, social sciences, computational sciences, natural sciences and medicine towards a broadscale interdisciplinary collaboration.

Requirements

• a recent or imminent Masters degree in computational linguistics, computer science, AI, or a related discipline.
• a strong academic track record with a background in machine learning and natural language processing.
• strong programming skills (Python)
• strong communication skills (English: essential; German: desirable)

We take gender balance and diversity seriously in our hiring decisions.

Salary and Duration

The PhD position is remunerated according to Swiss National Science Foundation Guidelines.

1st year	CHF 48'686.40
2nd year	CHF 50'238.90
from 3rd year	CHF 51'791.4

Funding is guaranteed for 4 years.

Environment

The University of Zurich is one of the top research universities in Europe, and Zurich is often ranked among the cities with the world's highest quality of life.

You will be joining the Department of Computational Linguistics, which has 5 faculty and around 40 postdoctoral and student researchers in the areas of text technologies, phonetics and speech. You will also closely collaborate with other members of the NCCR Evolving Languages, most closely with James Henderson. A research stay at Idiap is expected as part of the doctoral programme.

Apply

To apply, please send an application to sennrich AT cl.uzh.ch with the following documents (as a single PDF, English or German):

• a motivation letter (up to one page)
• a CV
• transcripts from your previous studies
• two references (name, position and e-mail address)

The application deadline is 5 January 2024.

For informal inquiries, please also contact sennrich AT cl.uzh.ch.