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Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics


Charles University, Czech Republic
Faculty of Mathematics and Physics

ÚFAL
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New PhD positions in Language Technologies and Computational Linguistics!

 

PhD program

  • Fully funded 4-year Ph.D. positions in Natural Language Processing & Deep Learning & Computational Linguistics
  • Special focus on artificial neural networks and multilingual NLP, more classical topics of Computational Linguistics are welcome as well
  • Industrial topics possible (co-supervision by an industry partner)
  • Hosted by the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics (UFAL), Computer Science School, Charles University, Prague

Institute

  • Amazing concentration of experts in all fields of NLP/HLT/CL/ML/DL/… (some 60 researchers in total)
    • Team members’ prizes and awards: ACL Lifetime Achievement Award, ELRA/LREC Antonio Zampolli Prize, CLARIN Achievements award, Hlavka Foundation Scientific achievement award, Gold and Silver medals by University and Faculty, Faculty Excellent Teaching Awards, …
  • Monthly social events, highly international environment
  • Range of EU and national projects (and other kinds of international cooperation too, incl. with the USA, Australia, Hong Kong)
  • Organizer of major CL/NLP/Speech events in the past: ACL&EMNLP'07, ACL’10, ASRU’13, DepLing'13, Coling’14, EAMT'17, TLT'17, SigDial'15, MT Marathons yearly (and more)
  • Highly competitive scientific achievements, shared task winners in CoNLL'18, VarDial'17, several WMTs…
  • Respectable hardware firepower: housing 100 GPUs (and counting), 1500 CPUs, 3 coffee machines

Location

  • Prague is one of the most beautiful cities in Europe
  • The Institute located in the very heart of the historical center, walking distance to all the main Prague attractions
  • The whole city covered by fast, clean and safe public transportation
  • Vibrant AI and ML community in Prague

Funding

  • Guranteed income easily covers student living expenses in Prague
  • A number of additional opportunities:
    • Bonuses for publication activity
    • Conference expenses funded for all accepted papers
    • Fully funded 6-month research stays abroad within the Ph.D. study
    • A possibility to participate in grant projects related to the student's research topic (additional income)

Requirements

  • Master-level degree in computational linguistics/computer science/linguistics
  • Ability to work independently on scientific topics
  • Good command of English
  • Good programming skills appreciated

Want to apply?

  • Have a look at the list of current UFAL PhD supervisors and their topics
  • Finding your future PhD supervisor at the Institute prior to the application is essential. A supervisor's signed agreement to supervise you is a necessary part of your official application to the programme.
    • Ideally, contact some of the potential supervisors directly (according to your research topic preferences).
    • If this fails, send an email to phd@ufal.mff.cuni.cz and we can help match you to potential supervisor. However, in order for us to be able to do this, please be more specific than just "I want to do a PhD in NLP" or "I am interested in low-resource languages". What topics are you excited about and why? What problems do you want to solve that bother you in language technologies you yourself use? What do you want to figure out? What research outputs from UFAL have you read that you find particularly exciting and why? Etc.
    • Attach your CV in either case, and ideally also a list of your publications (if any), your transcripts of records, and links to your project repositories (if public).
    • Getting in touch two months ahead of the official application deadline is a good minimum. Three months ahead of the deadline is better.
    • If you negotiate with two or more potential supervisors simultaneously, please indicate it clearly to all of them.
  • You may consider take part in UFAL Pre-PhD Student Internship Program too
  • General information about the faculty admission procedure is here
    • In the Study Information System, select these:
      • Faculty: Faculty of Mathematics and Physics
      • Language of Instruction: English (unless you speak Czech)
      • Form and type of study: full-time, doctoral
      • Study program / branch: Computational linguistics | P4I3A (P0619D140002)
  • A word on AI-driven communication: sooner or later, we do find out, and while there are legitimate uses of AI, we don't appreciate our time being wasted. The advisor matching step will involve an in-person conversation, and before you even get the necessary document that an advisor is willing to supervise you, there is another interview with a second senior researcher at UFAL.
    • Compensating for weaker English language skills is not legitimate use of AI in this case. Sufficient command of English without tool assistance is a skill you will inevitably need in the programme. And we much prefer to see your own writing, with whatever grammatical errors it may have - that will not disadvantage you in the application process.

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