Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics

UFAL Pre-PhD Student Internship

 

UFAL encourages excellent students from all countries interested in enrolling into the UFAL PhD study program “Computational linguistics” to start a cooperation with UFAL prior to the actual enrolment into the program. One of the options is to to enjoy the opportunity of spending one to three months in a partially-paid research internship position at UFAL. A successful internship stay will have a high positive value within the admission procedure into the PhD study program.

 

Two internship positions are offered every year: a fall internship and a spring internship. One internship candidate will be selected for each. The selected candidate will receive a unique opportunity of participating in research carried out at UFAL, or running his/her own short-term research project under guidance of one of the UFAL's professors or senior research associates. A joint publication is expected to result from the cooperation initiated during each internship.

 

An ideal candidate is expected to:

• have completed his/her master degree, or being close to it, so that the student can apply for a PhD position in the near future,
• have an excellent background in Computer Science,
• be deeply interested in Natural Language Processing, or Machine Learning, or Artificial Intelligence, or Data Mining, or the like,
• be interested in academic or industrial research, or both,

Student candidates should indicate their preferences for research topics already in their applications. Possible research directions include (but are not limited to):

• machine translation,
• parsing,
• dialog systems,
• morphology and tagging,
• semantic role labeling,
• named entity recognition,
• anaphora resolution,
• information retrieval, information extraction and summarization,
• multimodal analysis involving language (and images, video, etc.),
• natural language generation,
• machine learning methods for all of the above.

The internship is partially paid: travel expenses up to 15,000 CZK and accommodation expenses up to 8,000 CZK/month, or the actual expenses (whichever is lower) will be covered by UFAL. Students with genuinely outstanding research results achieved during the stay might receive further financial bonus (fully at the discretion of UFAL).

 

Formally, candidates will not become students of Charles University in Prague during the internship. They will have a visitor status, however, they will be allowed to attend any course taught by UFAL and, whenever possible, also courses of other departments.

 

Upcoming internship dates:

 

The exact internship dates can also be adjusted individually.

 

Applications for the internship must be sent by email to phd@ufal.mff.cuni.cz. Each application must contain the following (in English):

• CV, including a clear indication of which study programme at which university the candidate is currently enrolled in,
• a short motivation letter (<500 w.),
• a list of passed university courses related to mathematics, CS, NLP, ML, AI, including grades (plus a brief description of the grading scheme -- higher/lower is better, min./max. score),
• a list of publications, if any (can be a link to a Google Scholar profile or similar, too),
• preferred stay duration (from one to three months), and preferred timing within the applicable semester,
• preferred research topics, or a short-term research project proposal.

These materials help us (1) select candidates for whom this internship will actually be a productive use of their (and our) time, (2) route applications to potential supervisors. (If you want to be fast-tracked to the top of the list, find an appropriate supervisor and agree on a topic with them *first*, before actually sending the official application. This is hard, but worth trying. If you have a supervisor pre-arranged, indicate this in your application application and CC them.)

Practical tip for the preferred research topic: you should try to be more specific than "natural language processing, LLMs, RAG, multilinguality". Obviously, anyone coming to our department is interested in these topics: that does not help you stand out, and does not help us understand how you would be a good fit for UFAL research topics. Specific ideas also help us assess who would be a good supervisor for the internship, if any: we can't take on an intern on a project for which no supervisor exists. (We also do not keep a list of ready-made "ideas for interns to try" that we would just assign to you, though maybe we should try making such a list.)

Guiding internship applicants through the process is a matter of building relationships; this is a courtesy we extend to people, not agentic systems. We reserve the right to not respond to applications that have not taken due care to reflect these instructions, and to discontinue communication when we believe our dedication to the success of our internship programme is not being reciprocated.