Modeling Chinese history with Artificial Intelligence and Natural Language Processing

Applications are invited for a self-funded PhD project on applications of AI and/or NLP to the study of historical China. This PhD will be based in the Department of Computer Science and will be supervised by Dr. Donald Sturgeon (https://dsturgeon.net/about/). The project will apply recent developments in AI to the study of historical Chinese literature, history, and culture.

The work on this project might involve:

• Applications of NLP to the classical Chinese language that combine modern techniques (e.g. transformer architectures, large language models, etc.) with relevant aspects of the language domain (e.g. compositionality of Chinese characters, extremely large number of character types, commonly occurring non-standard and/or corrupted character forms).

• Machine translation and/or computer assisted translation for low resourced languages, with a focus on classical Chinese

• Automated augmentation and explanation of written Chinese-language works (historical, literary, or poetic) using AI

• Extraction of structured data from historical Chinese writing by use of deep learning and knowledge graphs

Entry requirements

• First class honours (or high 2.1 at undergraduate or equivalent Masters) degree in Computer Science or closely related subject (internationally: GPA 3.3+ or equivalent).

• Knowledge of modern programming languages including Python.

• Basic familiarity with deep learning architectures and concepts, as well as related toolkits (e.g. pytorch).

• Prior experience in research, industry and/or AI based research topics is beneficial but not essential.

• Language ability in modern and/or classical Chinese is desirable but not essential.

How to apply

Please send an email briefly describing your academic background and interest in this project together with your CV, degree transcripts and any supporting documents to Dr. Donald Sturgeon (donald.j.sturgeon@durham.ac.uk) for an initial discussion prior to formally applying.

Eligible applicants from mainland China may wish to consider applying for funding from the China Scholarship Council (CSC) (https://www.durham.ac.uk/study/scholarships/international/chinese-scholarships-council/ ), and should pay close attention to the relevant deadlines and procedures.