Practical information to applicants for PhD position in Natural language processing

PhD position (Third cycle)

The starting date for the PhD employment is 1st October 2023 or as soon as possible after this date, by negotiation, and the funding is available for four years of full-time PhD work. The content and scope follows the general syllabus for a PhD degree in Natural language processing. General and specific admittance requirements are described below under “Eligibility”. PhD salaries follow a fixed payscale set by the university. PhD positions are regular salaried positions, meaning that PhD candidates should spend the major part of their working hours in the department.

Application

The application must be made online in the University of Gothenburg’s web-based Job Application Portal. For technical support concerning the Job Application Portal, please contact rekrytering@gu.se.

(1) Application letter. This should include a brief account of your reasons for applying to this position and why you consider yourself a qualified candidate to work on the issue of pseudonymization within the project Mormor Karl (https://spraakbanken.gu.se/en/projects/mormor-karl), in particular on development of algorithms to automatically detect, label and pseudonymize personal identifiers in freely written texts (e.g. essays/blogs), focusing on linguistic challenges such as spelling errors, ambiguous entities, semantic constraints etc. Here you may also list any relevant information not naturally provided elsewhere. If you submit co-authored publications, your contribution to these should be stated here.

 

(2) CV.

 

(3) Grades and certificates. You must enclose an attested educational certificate listing the courses you have completed, including their extent. The certificate must show that you meet the general admittance requirements for postgraduate study as well as the specific admittance requirements specified in the syllabus for PhD studies in Natural language processing (both described below under “Eligibility”). If you do not meet these requirements, a separate document must be enclosed, where you clearly state on what grounds your qualifications can be said to correspond to the general and specific admittance requirements. Educational certificates in other languages than English, Swedish, Danish or Norwegian must be accompanied by a certified translation into one of these languages.

 

(4) Thesis and publications. Enclose relevant publications in support of your application. In addition to any peer-reviewed conference and journal publications, you may include advanced-level theses. Up to five publications can be enclosed; bibliographic information on any additional publications can be listed in the application letter. Note that the full texts themselves must be uploaded, not abstracts or URLs. The document format must be pdf without any kind of password protection.

 

(5) A PhD project description

You must enclose an independently written description (up to 3 pages, excl. references) of a PhD research project within NLP (with direct or indirect relevance to the theme of the funding project) to demonstrate your abilities to plan research and your competencies to carry out the proposed research.

The project description should be written in English. The document format must be pdf without any kind of password protection.

The project description should present a specific research question, together with a theoretically and methodologically grounded discussion motivating why this particular question merits investigation.

It should contain a brief survey of the research field presenting previous research and how your own proposed project relates to this research, in particular how your project will build on this earlier research and in what way it is expected to advance the field. It should further contain a methodology and data section where you discuss data requirements and availability, as well as the tools and analytical techniques with which you intend to address your research question, as well as any relevant ethical considerations. The project description may also contain a preliminary thesis outline and a commented rough time plan for the project.

The project description should be written in such a way that the points listed above are treated as elements of a structurally and logically coherent argument where the initial formulation of your research question serves as a foundation for everything that follows.

 

The project description will be assessed based on the following criteria: (a) knowledge of the relevant state-of-the art; (b) relevance of the research question(s) for the topic of the funding project Mormor Karl  and the state-of-the art of the proposed topic; (c) adequacy of the suggested methods for the research question(s) addressed in the project description; and (d) feasibility to carry out the proposed project within the period of the doctoral studies.

 

The project description is intended as evidence of the applicant’s ability to plan and motivate a more substantial research project. The actual research topic will be decided within the context of the funding project Mormor Karl in discussion with the candidate.

 

The research in Natural Language Processing in the department is conducted in our language technology research unit Språkbanken Text (the Text division of the Swedish Language Bank; https://spraakbanken.gu.se/), and, as characteristic of language technology research, each research project normally involves a group of researchers, including PhD candidates. See https://spraakbanken.gu.se/en/research and https://spraakbanken.gu.se/en/research/publications for an overview of the research activities. See also https://spraakbanken.gu.se/en/research/phd-program. If other individuals have been involved in the development of your project description, even if only in an advisory capacity, the nature and extent of their involvement must be stated explicitly and contact information provided for the person(s) involved.

 

For technical support concerning the Job Application Portal, please contact rekrytering@gu.se. Questions concerning the PhD program in NLP and the research unit where the PhD studies are conducted may be directed to our PhD coordinators at sb-phd-info@svenska.gu.se. General questions about PhD studies and the application process can also be directed to the associate head of department for doctoral studies,  Åsa Wengelin: asa.wengelin@svenska.gu.se.

 

Eligibility

General admission requirements

To meet the basic admission requirements of PhD programs at the University of Gothenburg, applicants must have obtained a second-cycle degree, have completed studies of at least 240 higher education credits of which at least 60 credits were awarded in the second-cycle, have completed a corresponding programme in some other country or be able to demonstrate the possession of equivalent qualifications.

 

Specific admission requirements, Natural language processing:

At least 30 credits from second-cycle courses in Computational linguistics, Language technology, or Natural language processing, including a thesis of at least 15 credits

 

or

At least 30 credits from second-cycle courses in linguistics, including a thesis of at least 15 credits, plus at least 30 credits from first-level courses in Language technology, Computational linguistics, Natural language processing, or Computer science.

 

or

At least 30 credits from second-cycle courses in Computer science, including a thesis of at least 15 credits, plus at least 30 credits from first-level courses in linguistics.

 

Applicants must have good written and oral proficiency in English. Basic knowledge of Swedish (alternatively Danish or Norwegian) is also a requirement.

 

Evaluation and ranking of applications

The project description and enclosed publications will be evaluated in accordance with the Higher Education Ordinance Chapter 7, and consider relevance and originality of the research question(s) and feasibility of the research project. The general background and specific qualifications of the applicants will be taken into account in the evaluation.

A preliminary decision and evaluations of applicants will be communicated to the applicants at latest by September, 29, 2023.