The School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh has an open PhD studentship position in the area of natural language processing and machine learning.


The topic of research is in finance, intersecting with NLP and text analysis. The most salient thread in the project is that of summarization, with the aim of addressing a variety of challenging and unique issues that arise with summarization of financial text. A topic aligned to this would be summarization of scientific articles (in all fields, not just finance).

The project will be done with an industry partner, a start-up that works in the area of financial data analysis. As such, a summer placement in the area of financial text analysis in that company is guaranteed (and required). The industry partner has offices in Hong Kong, Edinburgh and London.

The desired qualifications include an undergraduate background in computer science or a related field. There is a great advantage to applicants who have experience in the financial world, either formally through university training or through prior job experience. There is a strong preference for candidates who have completed a master's degree and have some research experience. Funding is currently limited to students from the UK/EU, but we encourage highly suitable applicants to apply from anywhere in the world, as funding might be available for such highly-suitable applicants.

The project will be carried out in the Cohort lab, which is part of the Edinburgh NLP group in the School of Informatics.

If interested, please apply through here: http://web.inf.ed.ac.uk/ilcc/study-with-us and please let me know that you have applied at scohen AT inf.ed.ac.uk. The deadline for applications is April 1st, 2020. The starting date is flexible, and can be earlier than September.

For more information about the application process, feel free contact me at scohen AT inf.ed.ac.uk.

About the School of Informatics:

The School of Informatics is one of the top-ranked computer science departments in Europe, and one of the largest research centres in the world, with over 100 faculty and 400 PhD students and researchers. A national research assessment exercise (REF 2014) concluded that the School has produced more world-leading and internationally renowned research in computer science than any other university in the UK. Our strength in machine learning, natural language processing, and other large fields has been recognised by recent awards from the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Data Science and more recently, a CDT in NLP, and in being selected, as one of only 5 UK universities, to be a founding partner of the Alan Turing Institute.

The city of Edinburgh is a beautiful city of historic sandstone buildings, many of which are part of a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and it provides a high quality of life --- or, in the words of Alexander McCall Smith, "a city of shifting light, of changing skies, of sudden vistas. A city so beautiful it breaks the heart again and again.”

For more information, see here.