An der Georg-August-Universität Göttingen Stiftung Öffentlichen Rechts - Institut für Informatik sind ab dem 01.12.2025 2 Stellen alsPhD Researcher - NLP-Reasoning for Low-Resource German (all genders welcome)- Entgeltgruppe 13 TV-L - in Vollzeit (teilzeitgeeignet) zu besetzen. Die Stellen sind befristet bis 31.10.2029.The Chair of Scientific Information Analytics, headed by Prof. Dr. Bela Gipp (GippLab - ), conducts research at the intersection of computer science, data science, and information science. Natural language processing (NLP) based on Large Language Models (LLM) is a particular research focus of the chair.
As part of the research project AI for Early New High German - The EDIKILEX Consortium, we are looking for two full-time positions for PhD researchers (all genders welcome).
Short Project Description: The Early New High German research consortium seeks a PhD researcher to contribute to a foundational project at the intersection of NLP, AI, and Digital Humanities. This project addresses the challenge of making historical texts-characterized by non-standardized spelling and grammar-accessible for modern digital analysis. As stewards of centuries-old knowledge, we have a responsibility to protect, rediscover, and understand our written heritage. While many historical documents are already digitized, current large language models (LLMs) struggle to process them due to missing training data and linguistic complexity (e.g., inconsistent spelling, ambiguity). As a result, large-scale computational analysis remains limited, requiring extensive manual interpretation by experts. This project aims to change that by developing novel NLP methods (specifically for lemmatization and word sense disambiguation) for low-resource historical German. The goal is to train LLMs capable of semantic reasoning over Early New High German, integrating scientific digital editions with historical dictionaries. By doing so, we will enhance the scalability of philological work, making historical knowledge more widely accessible for scholars and future generations.
You will be part of a collaborative consortium including the University of Göttingen, the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel, the University of Hildesheim, and the Göttingen Academy of Sciences and Humanities. Together, we will build the next generation of AI systems for historical language processing.
Your Responsibilities:
Conduct cutting-edge research in NLP for low-resource and historical languages, with a specific focus on Early New High German.
Develop and train state-of-the-art language models (e.g., Transformer-based architectures) to handle non-standardized spelling and grammar.
Design and implement methods for automatic lemmatization and semantic disambiguation, linking historical texts to dictionary entries.
Explore novel reasoning methods (e.g., PPO, GRPO, RLVR) to interpret words with unknown forms or meanings and learn from limited annotated data.
Collaborate with linguists, historians, and lexicographers to integrate domain expertise into AI models.
Contribute to the development of project frameworks and support partners in deploying models within user-facing web applications.
Publish your findings at leading NLP conferences (e.g., ACL, EMNLP, NAACL).
Teaching in accordance with the PhD program in Computer Science at the University of Göttingen (low workload).
Supervise Master's and Bachelor's students working on related projects.
Your Profile
A master's degree with a grade of very good (or equivalent) in computer science, computational linguistics, data science, or a related discipline.
Strong programming skills, particularly in Python.
Hands-on experience with deep learning frameworks (e.g., PyTorch) and NLP libraries (e.g., Hugging Face).
Solid foundation in NLP downstream tasks (e.g., NER, tokenization, word sense disambiguation).
Professional fluency (C1) in German and English, both written and spoken.
Communicative and teamwork-oriented mindset.
We Offer
A stimulating, interdisciplinary, and international research environment at one of Germany’s top-tier universities.
The chance to contribute to a high-impact project at the intersection of AI, linguistics, and cultural heritage.
Close, supportive supervision to foster both your academic and personal development toward a PhD.
Access to cutting-edge HPC resources, such as a GPU cluster with NVIDIA A100 GPUs, essential for large-scale model training.
Funding to present your research at premier international conferences and engage with the global scientific community.
A full-time position with a competitive salary under the German public service scale (TV-L), with the option of part-time employment.
Office space and technical equipment. The position will be located in Göttingen on-site.
This role requires regular on-site presence in Göttingen; remote work is possible to a limited extent.Die Universität Göttingen strebt in den Bereichen, in denen Frauen unterrepräsentiert sind, eine Erhöhung des Frauenanteils an und fordert daher qualifizierte Frauen nachdrücklich zur Bewerbung auf. Sie versteht sich zudem als familienfreundliche Hochschule und fördert die Vereinbarkeit von Wissenschaft/Beruf und Familie. Der beruflichen Teilhabe von schwerbehinderten Beschäftigten sieht sich die Universität in besondere Weise verpflichtet und begrüßt deshalb Bewerbungen schwerbehinderter Menschen. Bei gleicher Qualifikation erhalten Bewerbungen von Menschen mit Schwerbehinderung den Vorzug. Eine Behinderung bzw. Gleichstellung ist zur Wahrung der Interessen bereits in die Bewerbung aufzunehmen.Bitte reichen Sie Ihre aussagekräftige Bewerbung mit allen wichtigen Unterlagen bis zum 28.10.2025 ausschließlich über das Bewerbungsportal ein. Auskunft erteilt Herr Jan Philip Wahle, E-Mail: wahle@uni-goettingen.de, Tel. +495513925835Hinweis: Wir weisen darauf hin, dass die Einreichung der Bewerbung eine datenschutzrechtliche Einwilligung in die Verarbeitung Ihrer Bewerbungsdaten durch uns darstellt. Näheres zur Rechtsgrundlage und Datenverwendung finden Sie im Hinweisblatt zur Datenschutzgrundverordnung (DSGVO)
