PhD fellowship in Explainable Natural Language Understanding Department of Computer Science Faculty of SCIENCE University of Copenhagen

The Natural Language Processing Section at the Department of Computer Science, Faculty of Science at the University of Copenhagen invites applicants for a PhD fellowship in Explainable Natural Language Understanding.

The start date is expected to be 1 March 2026 or as soon as possible thereafter.

 

The position

The PhD fellowship is offered in the context of an ERC Starting Grant held by Isabelle Augenstein on ‘Explainable and Robust Automatic Fact Checking (ExplainYourself)’. ERC Starting Grant is a highly competitive funding program by the European Research Council to support the most talented early-career scientists in Europe with funding for a period of 5 years for blue-skies research to build up or expand their research groups.

ExplainYourself proposes to study explainable automatic fact checking, the task of automatically predicting the veracity of textual claims using machine learning methods, while also producing explanations about how the model arrived at the prediction. Automatic fact checking methods often use opaque deep neural network models, whose inner workings cannot easily be explained. Especially for complex tasks such as automatic fact checking, this hinders greater adoption, as it is unclear to users when the models’ predictions can be trusted. Existing explainable ML methods partly overcome this by reducing the task of explanation generation to highlighting the right rationale. While a good first step, this does not fully explain how a ML model arrived at a prediction. For knowledge intensive natural language understanding tasks such as fact checking, a ML model needs to learn complex relationships between the claim, multiple evidence documents, and commonsense knowledge in addition to retrieving the right evidence. There is currently no explainability method that aims to illuminate this highly complex process. In addition, existing approaches are unable to produce diverse explanations, geared towards users with different information needs. ExplainYourself radically departs from existing work in proposing methods for explainable fact checking that more accurately reflect how fact checking models make decisions, and are useful to diverse groups of end users. It is expected that these innovations will apply to explanation generation for other knowledge-intensive NLU tasks, such as question answering or entity linking.

The project team currently consists of the principle investigator, three PhD students and two postdocs, collaborators from CopeNLU as well as external collaborators.
The PhD student to be recruited in this call is expected to define their PhD project within the scope of the overall project, and collaborate with the larger project team.

 

Whom are we looking for?

Applicants should hold a MSc degree or equivalent in Computer Science or a related field, and have good written and oral English skills. The assessment of qualifications will also be made based on previous scientific publications (if any) and relevant work experience. The ideal candidate would have an educational background, prior research or work experience in ML or NLP.

Our group and research- and what do we offer?

The successful candidate will join the CopeNLU group at the University of Copenhagen. CopeNLU is a vibrant and collaborative research group led by Isabelle Augenstein and Pepa Atanasova with a focus on researching methods for tasks that require a deep understanding of language, as opposed to shallow processing. We are interested in core methodology research on, among others, learning with limited training data, interpretable and explainable AI; as well as applications thereof to tasks such as fact checking and question answering. With a strong focus on both foundational and applied research, we provide a platform for exploring cutting-edge topics in NLP, while also emphasizing the importance of transparent and responsible AI development.

We are affiliated with the Natural Language Processing Section in the Department of Computer Science, Faculty of SCIENCE, University of Copenhagen, as well as with the Pioneer Centre for AI, at the Department of Computer Science, University of Copenhagen. The group is co-located with the Pioneer Centre for AI in central Copenhagen. The Natural Language Processing Section provides a strong, international and diverse environment for research within core as well as emerging topics in natural language processing. The Natural Language Processing research environment at the University of Copenhagen is internationally leading, as e.g. evidenced by it being ranked second in Europe according to CSRankings. Further information about research at the Department is available here: https://di.ku.dk/english/research/ .

The principal supervisor is Prof. Isabelle Augenstein, Department of Computer Science, email: augenstein@di.ku.dk, and the co-supervisor is Pepa Atanasova, email: pepa@di.ku.dk.

 

The PhD programme

You can undertake the PhD programme as:

A three year full-time study within the framework of the regular PhD programme (5+3 scheme), if you already have an education equivalent to a relevant Danish Master’s degree.

Getting into a position on the regular PhD programme

Qualifications needed for the regular programme
To be eligible for the regular PhD programme, you must have completed a degree programme equivalent to a Danish Master’s degree (180 ECTS/3 FTE BSc + 120 ECTS/2 FTE MSc) related to the subject area of the position, i.e. NLP and ML. For information of eligibility of completed programmes, see General assessments for specific countries and Assessment database.

Terms of employment in the regular programme
Employment as a PhD fellow is full time, on site in Copenhagen, and for maximum 3 years.

Employment is conditional upon your successful enrolment as a PhD student at the PhD School at the Faculty of SCIENCE, University of Copenhagen. This requires submission and acceptance of an application for the specific position formulated by the applicant.

Terms of appointment and payment accord to the agreement between the Danish Ministry of Taxation and The Danish Confederation of Professional Associations on Academics in the State. The position is covered by the Protocol on Job Structure.

Responsibilities and tasks in the PhD programme

• Carry out a research project with increasing autonomy from your supervisors
• Collaborate with researchers both within the research group, and with external project partners
• Author scientific papers aimed at high-impact venues
• Disseminate research nationally and internationally
• Attend PhD courses on general skills development such as academic writing, as well as relevant specialised courses such as ML or NLP summer schools
• Conduct a change of scientific environment, preferably abroad
• Write and defend a PhD thesis on the basis of your project

 

We are looking for the following qualifications:

• Professional qualifications relevant to the PhD position
• Relevant educational background
• Relevant publications
• Relevant work experience
• Other relevant professional activities
• Curious mindset with a strong interest in explainable NLU
• Good written and oral English language skills

 

Application and Assessment Procedure

Your application including all attachments must be in English and submitted electronically by clicking APPLY NOW below.

Please include: 

1. Cover Letter detailing your motivation and background for applying for this PhD position;
2. Research Statement detailing your desired research focus and goals for the PhD studies within the scope of the specified position. The research statement should demonstrate your independent thinking by outlining a concrete research direction within explainable NLU you wish to explore, including: specific research questions you aim to address, preliminary ideas on methodological approaches you would employ, connections to existing literature, and the potential impact and applications;
3. Curriculum vitae including information about your education, experience, language skills and other skills relevant for the position;
4. Original diplomas for Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees and transcript of records in the original language, including an authorized English translation if issued in another language than English or Danish. If not completed, a certified/signed copy of a recent transcript of records or a written statement from the institution or supervisor is accepted;
5. Publication list (if available);
6. Reference letters (if available; alternatively, reference letters can submitted directly to augenstein@di.ku.dk for shortlisted candidates, at the latest one week after being informed about the shortlisting).

Application deadline:

The deadline for applications is 31 October 2025, 23:59 GMT +1.

We reserve the right not to consider material received after the deadline, and not to consider applications that do not live up to the abovementioned requirements.

The further process
After the deadline, a number of applicants will be selected for academic assessment by unbiased expert assessors. You will be notified about whether your application will be selected for assessment.

The assessors will assess the qualifications and experience of the shortlisted applicants with respect to the above-mentioned research area, skills and other requirements. The assessors will conclude whether each applicant is qualified. The assessed applicants will have the opportunity to comment on their assessments. You can read about the recruitment process at https://employment.ku.dk/faculty/recruitment-process/.

 

Interviews with selected candidates are expected to be held between 13 - 28 November 2025.

Questions
For specific information about the PhD fellowship, please contact augenstein@di.ku.dk.

General information about PhD study at the Faculty of SCIENCE is available at the PhD School’s website: https://www.science.ku.dk/phd/.

The University of Copenhagen wishes to reflect the surrounding community and invites all regardless of personal background to apply for the position.