PhD vacancy in Formal Methods for NLP, Leiden (the Netherlands)

Applications are invited for a fully funded PhD candidature at the Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science on the use of Formal Methods to enhance the efficiency, transparency and the understanding of Transformer-based language models.

While large language models (LLMs) have proven successful in many areas of Natural Language Processing, they suffer from high data and resource usage, and display limited generalization capacity in tasks that humans excel at. In this PhD project you will have the opportunity to investigate how formal methods can help in developing more efficient and more transparent models for Natural Language Understanding. Specifically, you will investigate the use of implicit or explicit structural bias in Transformer-based language models to reduce training data and model parameters; additionally, you will look at novel techniques for evaluating models for their generalization capabilities on Natural Language Understanding tasks such as Natural Language Inference, possibly in a multilingual and multimodal setting.

This is an autonomous PhD candidature and as such, you are expect to write a brief research proposal (max 1. page). The specific project content is to be decided between the applicants' interest and the expertise of the supervisor, dr. Gijs Wijnholds. The deadline to apply is January 13th, with a starting date in March 2024 or as soon as possible thereafter.