At the University of Göttingen -Public Law Foundation-, Institut für Informatik, there are 2 positions as
PhD Researcher - NLP-Reasoning for Low-Resource German (all genders welcome)
Entgeltgruppe 13 TV-L/100%
to be filled. Starting date is 12/1/2025. The position is limited to
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 While many historical documents are already digitized, current large language models (LLMs) struggle to process them due to missing training data and linguistic complexity (e.g., inconsistent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.
The University of Göttingen is an equal opportunities employer and places particular emphasis on fostering career opportunities for women. Qualified women are therefore strongly encouraged to apply in fields in which they are underrepresented. The university has committed itself to being a family-friendly institution and supports their employees in balancing work and family life. The University is particularly committed to the professional participation of severely disabled employees and therefore welcomes applications from severely disabled people. In the case of equal qualifications, applications from people with severe disabilities will be given preference. A disability or equality is to be included in the application in order to protect the interests of the applicant.
Please upload your application in one pdf file including the usual documents until 10/28/2025 on the application portal of the university using this link:. For more information get in touch with Jan Philip Wahle directly via E-Mail: -, Tel
Please note:
With submission of your application, you accept the processing of your applicant data in terms of data-protection law. Further information on the legal basis and data usage is provided in the Information General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)