Research Associate

Fixed-term for 36 months

Full time: 35 hours per week

The Opportunity:

The School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh invites applications for a Post-Doctoral Research Associate in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning to work with Dr Pasquale Minervini in the Edinburgh NLP Group. The project is funded by Huawei via the Huawei-Edinburgh Joint Lab initiative.

The researcher will work on projects involving the design and application of improving the robustness and trustworthiness of Large Language Models when solving complex reasoning tasks, while improving their explainability and generalisation properties. They will be part of the Edinburgh NLP Group, a world-leading research group in Natural Language Processing.

The School of Informatics is one of the largest research centres in Computer Science in Europe and is ranked #1 in the UK in terms of research power by a large margin. The Edinburgh NLP Group is consistently ranked among the world’s leading research groups in Natural Language Processing. We offer an exciting opportunity to work in an interdisciplinary, collaborative, friendly, and supportive environment that integrates various fields of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced NLP by providing more accurate solutions for a wide variety of problems, ranging from (open domain) question answering to complex reasoning tasks. Still, LLMs tend to produce hallucinations -- sentences that appear fluent but are semantically nonsensical, often containing factual inaccuracies -- with potentially catastrophic implications. This project aims to explore, develop and benchmark strategies for improving the factuality and reliability of LLMs when answering complex questions and solving complex tasks – for example, via Chain-of-Thought reasoning.

We welcome both local (UK-resident) and international applicants. This position includes funding for international travel – e.g., for attending conferences, visiting research collaborators, and disseminating research findings. Furthermore, the researcher will have access to the computing infrastructure and office spaces available to the School of Informatics, the Edinburgh NLP Group, and the Edinburgh Laboratory for Integrated Artificial Intelligence.

We are strongly committed to offering everyone an inclusive and non-discriminating working environment. We warmly welcome qualified candidates from all backgrounds to apply and particularly encourage applications from underrepresented groups in the field.

Your skills and attributes for success: 

Essential:

• PhD (or near completion) in Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, or a related discipline.
• Experience and evidence of effective independent research work within an interdisciplinary team. More broadly, demonstrated ability to plan and execute a research project, solve problems independently, and make original contributions to a research field. 
• Demonstrated quality of research performance, as evidenced by high-quality publications in top-tier ML and NLP venues (e.g., ACL, EMNLP, NAACL, ICML, NeurIPS, ICLR, AAAI, IJCAI, WWW, KDD, ICDM, and relevant journals).
• Strong programming skills; experience with Python NLP and deep learning libraries (e.g., HF Transformers, PyTorch, Jax, or TensorFlow).
• Ability to communicate complex information clearly, orally and in writing, in English

Desirable: 

• Experience with NLP (e.g., working with LLMs, multi-GPU inference and training, parameter-efficient fine-tuning, model alignment) and machine learning (e.g., latent variable models, optimisation, reinforcement learning, and neuro-symbolic integration)

Contact details for enquiries:  Dr Pasquale Minervini (p.minervini@ed.ac.uk , https://www.neuralnoise.com)

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