Applications are invited for a 4-year funded PhD studentship on the topic of Neural Network Interpretability for Natural Language Processing (NLP). The position is part of a Science Foundation Ireland-funded Frontiers for the Future project with the aim of uncovering the linguistic strengths and weaknesses of neural NLP systems.

Modern NLP is underpinned by complex systems, pre-trained on billions of words of text, and then fine-tuned on smaller datasets which are labelled for a particular NLP task, such as named entity recognition, question answering or sentiment analysis. While these networks exhibit impressive performance on virtually all NLP tasks, their complex architecture and the sheer volume of pre-training data makes their decision-making process difficult to interpret. The PhD student will be part of a team of three, working closely with the project Principal Investigator and a postdoctoral Research Fellow, in contributing new methods and challenge datasets to aid in interpreting these systems.

The successful applicant will receive a stipend of €18,500 per annum (non-taxed), along with equipment, travel funding and annual student fees. They will be based in the School of Computing, Dublin City University. The school has a rich tradition in Natural Language Processing and offers a stimulating environment for research in this area, with several other PhD students investigating topics such as parsing, generation, machine reading comprehension, sentiment analysis, machine translation and Irish NLP.

Minimum Qualifications

  • Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science (or related field)
  • Experience in Natural Language Processing or Deep Learning

Desired Qualifications

  • Master’s Degree in Machine Learning, Data Science, or related field
  • Knowledge of linguistics

The anticipated starting date is Spring 2022.

Informal inquiries should be sent to Jennifer Foster (jennifer.foster@dcu.ie).

To apply, please email 1) a detailed CV, 2) a cover letter, highlighting relevant experience, and 3) the contact details of two academic referees to Jennifer.Foster@dcu.ie.

The position is open until filled.