Are you looking for a PhD position where you can combine insights from machine learning and cognitive science? Are you interested in improving and better understanding artificial intelligence systems for natural language processing? If you are excited about doing this kind of research in an interdisciplinary environment, with a team of smart and friendly colleagues, then you may want to join us at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC).

We are looking for a PhD candidate in the field of NLP to join the Dialogue Modelling Group led by Raquel Fernández at the ILLC, University of Amsterdam (UvA), in a project that will be carried out in collaboration with Barbara Plank’s NLP research lab at IT University of Copenhagen. The main goal of the project is to advance performance on language understanding tasks and to shed new light on interpretability questions in AI by using human gaze data. This PhD position is funded by the Amsterdam Unit of ELLIS (the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems).

What are you going to do?

You are expected to:

• complete and defend a PhD thesis within the official appointment duration of four years;
• regularly present research results at international workshops and conferences, and to publish them in conference proceedings and journals;
• participate in and contribute to the organisation of research activities and events at the ILLC, such as workshops and colloquia;
• make a small contribution to the ILLC’s educational mission, by working as a teaching assistant for courses in your area of expertise and by assisting with the supervision of student research projects.

While you will be based in Amsterdam, you will be required to spend some time in Copenhagen (for example, 3 months per year).

What do we require?

You should hold, or expect to obtain before the start of your appointment, a Master’s degree in a relevant discipline, such as Computational Linguistics, AI, Computer Science, or Cognitive Science. You also should possess:

• an excellent academic track record;
• a serious interest in pursuing fundamental research;
• good programming skills and experience with deep learning methods for NLP;
• good writing and presentation skills;
• good social and organizational skills;
• full professional proficiency in spoken and written English.

You must be able to start by 1 September 2021 (starting earlier is possible).

Please note that knowledge of the Dutch language is not required for this position, nor is it required for being able to live in Amsterdam. However, PhD candidates at the ILLC have the opportunity to attend Dutch language classes if they wish.

Our offer

We offer a temporary contract for 38 hours per week for the duration of 4 years (the initial contract will be for a period of 18 months and after satisfactory evaluation it will be extended for a total duration of 4 years). This should lead to a dissertation (PhD thesis). We will draft an educational plan that includes attendance of courses and (international) meetings. We also expect you to assist in teaching undergraduates and master students.

The salary, depending on relevant experience before the beginning of the employment contract, will be €2,395 to €3,061 (scale P) gross per month, based on full-time employment (38 hours a week). These amounts are exclusive 8% holiday allowance and 8,3% end-of-year bonus. A favourable tax agreement, the ‘30% ruling’, may apply to non-Dutch applicants. The  Collective Labour Agreement of Dutch Universities applies. 

Are you curious about our extensive package of secondary employment benefits such as our excellent opportunities for study and development? Take a look at our website.

University of Amsterdam

With over 5,000 employees, 30,000 students and a budget of more than 600 million euros, the University of Amsterdam (UvA) is an intellectual hub within the Netherlands. Teaching and research at the UvA are conducted within seven faculties: Humanities, Social and Behavioural Sciences, Economics and Business, Law, Science, Medicine and Dentistry. Housed on four city campuses in or near the heart of Amsterdam, where disciplines come together and interact, the faculties have close links with thousands of researchers and hundreds of institutions at home and abroad.  

The UvA’s students and employees are independent thinkers, competent rebels who dare to question dogmas and aren’t satisfied with easy answers and standard solutions. To work at the UvA is to work in an independent, creative, innovative and international climate characterised by an open atmosphere and a genuine engagement with the city of Amsterdam and society.

Faculty of Science – Institute for Logic, Language and Computation

The Faculty of Science has a student body of around 7,000, as well as 1,600 members of staff working in education, research or support services. Researchers and students at the Faculty of Science are fascinated by every aspect of how the world works, be it elementary particles, the birth of the universe or the functioning of the brain.

The Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) is an interdisciplinary research institute, shared between the Faculty of Science and the Faculty of Humanities, where computational linguists, computer scientists, cognitive scientists, logicians, mathematicians, and philosophers collaborate. It offers an international research environment with world-class faculty in all of its areas of specialization, including several areas of specialization within AI. We are based in the beautiful city of Amsterdam, renowned for its historic system of canals, its laid-back cosmopolitan atmosphere, and its excellent connections to the rest of Europe and the world.