Applications are invited to apply for a fully funded PhD candidate position to perform research in the field of computational linguistics at the LT³ - Language and Translation Technology Team at the Department of Translation, Interpreting and Communication at Ghent University. LT³ conducts fundamental and applied research in the domain of language and translation technology and has extensive expertise in the use of machine learning for a wide range of language technology problems, int.al. part-of-speech tagging and lemmatization, anaphora resolution, word sense disambiguation and named entity recognition.

The candidate will be embedded in the Interdisciplinary project “Interconnected texts. A graph-based computational approach to Byzantine paratexts as nodes between textual transmission and cultural and linguistic developments”. This project aims to reveal the connections between linguistic patterns and text-historical developments in a corpus of metrical paratexts in Byzantine Greek manuscripts, situating these connections in the historical context of material book production and varying reading strategies. It will develop new digital tools designed to detect patterns and variations in a fluid, fragmented, and heavily entangled textual corpus.

The PhD candidate will research new machine learning approaches to link similar verses in order to connect related epigrams in the DBBE database, combining automatic linguistic preprocessing techniques, and machine learning approaches to measure orthographic and semantic similarity between text strings.

The candidate will perform academic research in preparation of a doctoral dissertation. The PhD student will be enrolled in the doctoral training program of Ghent University and will have the opportunity to attend international conferences and to spend a research stay abroad in other research labs.

Given these tasks, we are searching for a candidate with a background in computational linguistics and having a good knowledge of ancient and/or Byzantine Greek.