[apologies for cross-postings]
the Department of Interpreting and Translation of University of
Università di Bologna [1] is offering one fully-paid three-year PhD
grant in the program “Translation, Interpreting, and Intercultural
Studies”, starting in November 2025. Besides the monthly stipend, the
PhD programme guarantees additional economic support for a 6 to 12
months internship abroad.
Project description. LLMs (e.g., Llama, deepseek, Gemini, chatGPT) have
turned into pervasive services faster than hardly any previous
technology around the world. Still, the quality of their output is
highly imbalanced between English and other languages. Despite their
successful handling of many complex linguistic tasks, LLMs have a hard
time dealing with regional concepts and realia for which not enough data
exist online. The PhD should focus on...
(a) measuring the level (or lack) of local cultural knowledge by LLMs in
multiple languages,
(b) measuring the influence of English in LLM-produced texts, both from
a linguistic and a cultural point of view, in applications such as
machine translation, dialogue and text generation, and
(c) designing and implementing strategies to produce and publish
high-quality multicultural data and incorporate them in LLMs to boost
their local awareness.
We focus especially on (Italian) gastronomy.
We welcome candidates with relevant backgrounds in natural language
processing, digital humanities, and/or translation/linguistics, among
others. We encourage students with programming and machine learning skills.
For expressions of interest and informal discussion, please contact
Prof. Alberto Barrón-Cedeño [2].
For the official application process, please visit:
-
https://www.unibo.it/en/study/phd-professional-masters-specialisation-schools-and-other-programmes/phd/2025-2026/translation-interpreting-and-intercultural-studies
(in English)
-
https://www.unibo.it/it/studiare/dottorati-master-specializzazioni-e-altra-formazione/dottorati/2025-2026/traduzione-interpretazione-e-interculturalita
(in Italian)
(the “official” title of the project is “On the treatment of local
cultural concepts by large language models and the societal impact of
pervasive Artificial Intelligence”)
The student will depart from ongoing work within projects !Translate
[3], GastroWiki [4] and GIARA. (S)he will also interact with an ongoing
PhD research on NLP applied to gastronomy [5,6], and will join a growing
research group with four professors (covering disciplines across
computer science and linguistics) and four 2nd- and 3rd-year PhD students.
Timeline, all in 2025:
- 1st of July: application deadline (notice that the application
includes a project proposal, prepared by the applicant).
- 1st week of July: short-listing of the best applicants and invitation
to oral interviews
- Mid July: oral interviews with the commission (in presence or online)
- End of July: publication of the final decision
- 1st of November: the PhD starts.
[1] https://dit.unibo.it
[2] https://www.unibo.it/sitoweb/a.barron/en ;
https://aclanthology.org/people/a/alberto-barron-cedeno/
[3] https://site.unibo.it/no-translate/en
[4] https://site.unibo.it/gastrowiki/
[5] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0306457325001360
[6] https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-3878/46_main_long.pdf
Best regards,
Alberto Barrón-Cedeño
--
Alberto Barrón-Cedeño (PhD)
Associate Professor (NLP)
DIT Università di Bologna
https://www.unibo.it/sitoweb/a.barron/
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