"PhD Position in Parsing and Formal Representation of Geographic Questions"

Job Summary

As a PhD candidate in the ERC-funded GeoTrAnsQData project at Utrecht University, you will build models and methods to parse natural language questions into geo-analytical workflows, combining NLP and semantic representations to improve how complex spatial questions can be answered.

Responsibilities

• Build and annotate a corpus of geo-analytical questions and their associated purposes, data needs, and analytical steps in geo-analytical standard scenarios.
• Develop a model of geo-analytical purposes (transformation requests) and a corresponding question grammar.
• Perform a user study on geo-analytical question formulation to express such purposes.
• Contribute to the formalisation of spatial question types using a purpose-driven taxonomy.
• Develop a hybrid question parsing pipeline using NLP and formal semantic representations.
• Investigate Large Language Models (LLMs) as well as symbolic AI for question parsing.
• Evaluate models based on a gold standard of geo-analytic purposes and questions.
• Collaborate with a technical assistant, another PhD candidate, and a postdoc.

Qualifications and Requirements

• A completed or near-completed MSc degree in Artificial Intelligence, Computational Linguistics, GeoInformatics, Geography, Geoscience, or a related field.
• Experience with natural language processing (NLP), language modelling, grammatical models, and question-answering (QA).
• A strong interest in maps and geographic information as well as spatial questions.
• An interest in conceptual modelling, knowledge representation, and knowledge graphs.
• Programming skills in Python and knowledge of relevant NLP libraries (e.g., spaCy, Hugging Face Transformers).
• Good English communication skills and an interest in interdisciplinary collaboration.

What the Employer Offers

A position for one year, with an extension to a total of four years upon successful assessment, with the intent to result in a doctorate. A working week of 38 hours and a gross monthly salary between €3,059 and €3,881. Additional benefits include 8% holiday pay, 8.3% year-end bonus, a pension scheme, partially paid parental leave, and flexible terms of employment based on the CAO NU.