Natural Language Processing (Funded Scholarship)

This PhD scholarship will be linked to the UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship of Dr Jose Camacho Collados. The fellowship project is titled “Unsupervised background knowledge for multilingual language understanding” and you can find more details below.    

The UKRI fellowship largely deals with language understanding, with a focus on improving Natural Language Processing (NLP) models as to be more interpretable, capture relational and commonsense knowledge, and enhance multilinguality. With these features, NLP can serve as a powerful tool to address important challenges in AI. Examples of such challenges are disinformation and improving mental health treatments, applications that will be explored as part of the UKRI fellowship through the analysis of available information at scale (e.g. social media or clinical records) and collaboration with interdisciplinary teams.

The PhD project may or may not be linked to any of these applications. Outside of the general NLP theme, the scope of the PhD is flexible, and can be discussed between candidate and supervisor.

The successful candidate will be integrated in the Cardiff NLP group of Cardiff University. This post also involves an optional research visit (depending on availability and expertise) to one of the international partners of the project in the University of Granada (Spain), University of Helsinki (Finland) or the University of Cambridge (UK).

Subject Areas: Natural Language Processing / Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning

Academic criteria: A 2:1 Honours undergraduate degree or a master's degree, in computing, natural language processing or a related subject. Applicants with appropriate professional experience are also considered. Applicants for whom English is not their first language must demonstrate proficiency by obtaining an IELTS score of at least 6.5 overall, with a minimum of 6.0 in each skills component.

Start date: 1 October 2021 (Please note the start date may be deferred to 1 January 2022, subject to the availability of the lead supervisor).

Deadline for full online application: 4th March 2021

Apply online: Contact the project supervisor for more information; Dr Jose Camacho Collados Email: [Email Address Removed]

Follow our guidance online, submit your research proposal of approximately 500 words and enter “I am applying for Natural Language Processing PhD Scholarship in Computer Science and Informatics” in the Funding field and specify the supervisor of this project in the text box provided. For more information, please visit: www.cardiff.ac.uk/study/postgraduate/research/programmes/programme/computer-science-and-informatics