We are pleased to announce the availability of 2 new 3-year fully-funded PhD positions in our group!

Application deadline: May 15th, 2026, hrs. 04:00 PM (CEST)

Application Details: https://iecs.unitn.it/education/admission/call-for-application

Online Application Form: https://webapps.unitn.it/Apply/en/Web/Home/dott

Topic: Human-centred Evaluation Frameworks for Multilingual Technologies (A6 scholarship)

How we measure and define performance shapes the systems we build. Current Natural Language Processing (NLP) benchmarks often prioritize leaderboard scores over practical utility, failing to capture how models behave in real-world, socially situated contexts. This PhD project treats evaluation methodology as a research problem in its own right, advancing both the conceptual foundations and computational tools for assessing NLP systems in ways that are reliable, valid, and human-centred. Application domains include multilingual settings, such as machine translation, and emerging agentic and interactive multimodal NLP systems involving human-AI collaboration present frontier evaluation challenges. The ultimate goal is to develop evaluation frameworks that capture not only overall system performance, but also real-world utility, fairness, and responsiveness to the needs of diverse stakeholders.

Topic: Multimedia Personalization with Multimodal Large Language Models (A7 scholarship)

The rise of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) is transforming language, speech, and vision technologies, enabling unprecedented capabilities in translation, summarization, and, in general, content generation. This PhD project will focus on personalization, exploring how models can adapt to individual users’ preferences, context, and communication style. Research directions include adaptive speech-to-speech translation, context-aware description generation, text simplification, and modeling users’ preferences. By integrating these approaches into MLLMs, the project aims to create more natural, context-sensitive, and user-centric multilingual experiences, pushing the boundaries of how AI can serve people on an individual level.

Contacts:

negri@fbk.eu, bentivo@fbk.eu