The Computational Linguistics group (GroNLP) of the Center for Language and Cognition Groningen (CLCG) is looking for a PhD student in “Language technology for cultural heritage: New discoveries with little data” within the HAICu research project. The HAICu project is a large-scale Dutch research project by universities and cultural-heritage institutions into new forms of Artificial Intelligence-based access to multimodal Cultural-Heritage data, both contemporary and historical. Within HAICu, AI researchers, Digital Humanities researchers and a wide range of public and private partners will co-develop scientific solutions to unlock the true societal potential of the current heterogeneous digital heritage collections. It will provide easier, richer and more reliable data access to citizens, journalists, civic organisations, and various other stakeholders.

HAICu is funded by the NWO National Science Agenda (NWA) and has a budget of about EUR 10 million. HAICu has started in January 2024 and will last 6 years (until Jan 2030).
For more information about HAICu, please see https://www.haicu.science/

The PhD Project
This specific PhD position is about effectively dealing with missing and sparse labels in humanities datasets such as literature, history, philosophy. Cultural heritage institutions, and especially the National Library of the Netherlands, offer access to a lot of digitized data which can be leveraged through computational approaches. However, it is very common that the data is incomplete. This is a challenge for typical machine learning methods that rely on being fed with representative and complete data, leading to systems that cannot handle distribution shifts or extrapolating beyond their training set.

Recent developments in artificial intelligence have shown that large language models are able to learn from small amounts of training data, or even none at all (few shot and zero shot learning). Paired with more and more accessible techniques for specializing existing models for target domains and tasks, a lot of new possibilities open up for cultural heritage data, which will be explored within this project. Examples of possible topics include

- Investigating literary reception and prestige over time.
- Detecting and mapping intertextuality within texts.
- Uncovering the influences and biases over time in datasets.
- Monitoring the evolution of concepts in textual datasets.
- Improving the robustness of models to out-of-distribution data.

The project will, in collaboration with the National Library of The Netherlands, be coordinated by Andreas van Cranenburgh, Tommaso Caselli, and Malvina Nissim at the University of Groningen. This is an interdisciplinary project at the intersection of Computational Linguistics/Natural Language Processing (NLP) and the humanities.

You will be asked to

- Develop a specific research proposal within the proposed theme.
- Review the academic literature relevant to the project’s goals.
- Carry out research, present your results and author scientific articles on the above mentioned topics.
- Collaborate with members of the Computational Linguistics group at the University of Groningen, the National Library, and with the broader Haicu consortium, in particular WP3 (see below).
- Engage and collaborate with other researchers working on computational humanities research.
- Complete a PhD thesis written in English in the specified timeframe (4 years).
- Collaborate on outreach and public engagement activities.
- Gain teaching experience.

This PhD project offers a unique opportunity to work in an international environment and to acquire valuable research experience: You will be carrying out research in the context of the Computational Linguistics group of the Center for Language and Cognition (CLCG) of the University of Groningen, and will be spending at least one day a month at the National Library in The Hague.

Within the dynamic HAICu team, the PhD researcher will participate in Work Package 3 (WP3), titled “Learning from sparse examples”. In this WP, we will collaborate with AI and machine learning experts from the University of Tilburg, the Fontys Hogeschool as well as other partners, in addition to the aforementioned Dutch National Library.

Since its foundation in 1614, the University of Groningen has established an international reputation as a dynamic and innovative university offering high-quality teaching and research. Its 34,000 students are encouraged to develop their own individual talents through challenging study- and career paths. The University of Groningen is an international centre of knowledge: It belongs to the best research universities in Europe and is allied with prestigious partner universities and networks worldwide.

The Faculty of Arts is a large, dynamic faculty in the heart of the city of Groningen. It has more than 5000 students and 700 staff members, who are working at the frontiers of knowledge every day. The Faculty offers a wide range of degree programmes: 15 Bachelor's programmes and over 35 Master's specialisations. Our research, which is internationally widely acclaimed, covers Archaeology, Cultural Studies, History, International Relations, Language and Literary Studies, Linguistics and Media and Journalism Studies.

- A Master’s degree in computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, digital humanities, computer science, information science, or related area.
- Excellent communication and academic writing skills in English.
- Reading skills in Dutch are a plus, given that most data at the National Library is in Dutch.
- Team player mindset and aptitude for interdisciplinary research.
- Machine learning skills are mandatory.
- Experience with training and/or designing neural networks for language processing tasks is strongly desired.
- Research experience in low-resource NLP and/or modeling of humanities data is a plus.

Fixed-term contract: 48 months.

In accordance with the Collective Labour Agreement for Dutch Universities, the University of Groningen offers you:

- A salary of € 2,872 gross per month in the first year, up to a maximum of € 3,670 gross per month in the final year, based on a full-time position.
- A holiday allowance of 8% gross annual income.
- An 8.3% end-of-the-year allowance.
- A temporary 1.0 FTE appointment for a specified period of four years. The candidate will first be appointed for twelve months. After six months, an assessment will take place of the candidate’s results and the progress of the PhD project, in order to decide whether employment will be continued.
- The PhD candidate is expected to conduct a total of 0.4 FTE teaching spread over the second, third and fourth year of their appointment.
- Willingness to move and reside in The Netherlands .

The appointment will commence as soon as possible and before the end of 2024 at the very latest. We allow 3 months from selection in case of VISA applications.