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Are you looking for a new challenge?

The DigiTS team is looking for a junior researcher to join our team to work on linguistic annotation with LLM-s.

This specialisation belongs to the doctoral programme in Humanities at the University of Tartu (Estonia).

There is 1 position available.

Research topic open for admission: Linguistic Annotation with LLMs (supervisor Maciej Eder)
It is not possible to apply with your own topic during the application period.

Description of the topic:

The PhD project is aimed at testing several Large Language Models in solving a variety of different linguistic annotation tasks. Intuitively, some of these tasks should be accomplished by the models at an acceptable accuracy level, but we have no empirical evidence to support such a hypothesis. This project will try to test, in a series of carefully designed experiments, the extent to which LLMs are capable of recognizing patterns in scenarios that they were not optimized for.

Primarily, the datasets used in this project will be already-existing manually-annotated “gold sets” from a number of previous studies. Some of the chosen datasets will be relatively easy to solve by most LLMs, whereas some other tasks will be chosen specifically to make the problem difficult for the models.

The primary methodological setup used in this project will be a series of supervised machine-learning scenarios, in which the same set will be automatically annotated, and then compared against the human-annotated “gold set”. A series of different models will be tested. Distilled and quantized Large Language Models will be used, adjusted through zero-shot prompting. A series of alternative prompting strategies will be conducted. Also, the novel class of reasoning models, implementing chain-of-thought output and imitating human reasoning, will be heavily tested in this project.

Admitted doctoral researcher will work as a junior research fellow at the university. The estimated workload is 1.0 and the estimated time period is four years. Studies are expected to start in autumn 2026. The final workload and exact starting date will be fixed after the student is admitted, during work contract negotiations.

Candidates must submit an application with other requested documents:

• The list of required documents on the programme website
• Requirements for the doctoral thesis project (Linguistics)

Online entrance interviews take place in early October. Applicants will be informed of their interview time by the respective faculty.

Admission requirements:

• English language proficiency – please make sure you also meet our language requirements (https://ut.ee/en/sisu/phd-language-requirements)
• Master’s degree or equivalent qualification. This means that your master’s degree should enable you to apply for doctoral studies in the education system in which you received the master’s degree. However, there might be differences between higher education systems and access requirements to PhD programmes in different countries. To apply to the University of Tartu, your qualification should correspond to a master’s degree in the Estonian higher education system.

APPLY VIA DREAMAPPLY (September 15-30, 2026)

Additional information: https://ut.ee/en/content/phd-open-calls