Opening for a PhD position at the Transducens research group in Alicante (Spain), working with LLMs for translating low-resource languages

The Transducens research group (https://transducens.dlsi.ua.es) at Universitat d’Alacant (https://www.ua.es) is excited to announce an opening for a PhD position in Alicante, Spain.

This is a fantastic opportunity to contribute to a research project funded by the Spanish Research Agency and the European Social Fund: A way to make Europe focusing on crucial areas:

  • Multilingual machine translation: Exploitation of unstructured linguistic information to improve the translation of low-resource language pairs with large language models (LLMs).
  • Large language models:  Development of advance chain-of-thought prompting techniques to enhance the translation process with LLMs.
  • Societal impact: Development of machine translation systems for low-resource and extremely low-resource language pairs with a large potential impact in their respective linguistic communities.

You will be part of the Transducens research group, a dynamic research group with 25+ years of experience in low-resource machine translation and translation technologies. In addition, you will work in a joint project with Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center.

As part of you PhD work you will:

  • Fine-tune and adapt existing multilingual LLMs for specific tasks.
  • Acquire and prepare corpora and datasets for machine translation training and evaluation.
  • Develop novel methods for the exploitation of linguistic resources of any kind (dictionaries, books, etc.) to improve the performance of LLM-based machine translation systems for low-resource languages.
  • Integrate your software into existing libraries and applications.
  • Release software and corpora under free/open-source licenses.
  • Participate in meetings, write reports, and publish scientific papers.
  • Travel to attend international conferences reputed in the field.
  • Make a short research stay (3+ months) in another European research institution

What we are looking for:

  • Required Education:
    • You must meet the requirement to enroll in the PhD program in Computer Science at Universitat d’Alacant. This usually means having:
      • A university degree (240 ECTS; European Credit Transfer System; equivalent to four full-time academic years) in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Data science, or equivalent, and
      • A master degree (60 ECTS; equivalent to one full-time academic year) in Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Data science, Computational Linguistics or equivalent.
      • Alternatively, if your university degree amounts to 300 ECTS credits (equivalent to five full-time academic years), a master’s degree is not required.
    • If your studies are not organized in ECTS credits, and you meet the requirement to enroll in a PhD program at your university, most probably you meet the requirement to enroll in the PhD program in Computer Science at Universitat d’Alacant.
  • Experience: Not required, but will be considered if applicable.
  • Key skills: Highly motivated to keep learning and to develop skills in cutting-edge multilingual technologies for natural language processing and machine translation.
  • Languages: English (able to read and write scientific papers, and to attend international conferences). Desirable knowledge of Spanish or Catalan.
  • Additional Assets: Experience in research projects, scientific writing/publishing, natural language processing, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and software development.

What we offer:

  • Duration: 4 years
  • Gross Salary: € 24,468.22 annually. (+ € 3,223.54 at the end of the contract)
  • Budget for a research stay in another research institution: € 5,800.
  • Comprehensive benefits: Full tuition waiver for the doctoral program, travel costs to attend international conferences, social security, employment benefits, paternity/maternity leave, and free access to the Spanish public health system.
  • Leave: 4 weeks of annual leave, with the possibility to work remotely during Christmas and Easter periods.

Location: Alicante is a mid-sized city on Spain’s southeastern coast. Known for its sunny climate, beaches, and rich cultural heritage, it is a popular tourist destination. The city is also well-connected, with direct flights to most European capitals. More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alicante

Question? Send a message to fsanchez@ua.es.

How to Apply:

If you plan to apply, please prepare your CV using the template available at https://ssp.ua.es/es/selecinvest/documentos/plazas-personal-investigador-para-proyectos-investigacion/cva-pid2024/en-cva-pid2024-predoc.docx and write to fsanchez@ua.es; we will support you in making the formal application thought the university’s online portal.

When the call officially opens (around October, 1st), you will have approximately 10 working days to submit your CV, the application form, and scanned certificates for each merit listed in your CV.  The official opening date and deadline will be communicated ASAP.

VERY IMPORTANT: All merits listed in the CV must be duly supported by the corresponding certificate (undergraduate and master’s degrees, completed training, research stays, etc.). In the case of publications you must provide a persistent paper identifier (e.g. DOI).

Guide on how to apply (must read; ask for help if needed): https://ssp.ua.es/es/selecinvest/documentos/plazas-personal-investigador-para-proyectos-investigacion/guide-on-how-to-apply-for-research-staff-positions-on-research-projects.pdf