Offre de thèse
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Date limite de candidature
08-07-2026
Date de début de contrat
01-11-2026
Directeur de thèse
VINCKEL-ROISIN Hélène
Encadrement
Joint Doctorate in the context of the Doctoral Network Project 'MultiLAwa': Multilingual Language Awareness in the European Digital Society (MSCA, Horizon Europe, N° 101310669) Co-supervisor: Mirjam Schmuck, University of Copenhagen - Secondment periods at Associated Partners : Center for Rhetorical Science Communication Research on Artificial Intelligence (RHET-AI), Tübingen (Germany), 4 months, and Leibniz Institute for the German Language (IDS), Mannheim (Germany), 1 month A Personal Career Development Plan (PCDP) will be set-up within two months after recruitment, by the Doctoral Candidate (DC) together with the DC-Supervision Committee. The PCDP , to be updated every six months, includes: i) Research work plan and progress with timing and deadlines, incl. schedule of secondment mobilities; ii) Training: Network training activities and definition of the scientific lectures and training courses; iii) Publication plan: at least 2 papers during the funded period time in international journals with diamond / gold OA policy as well as 1 joint publication at the WP-level; iv) Communication & outreach activities; v) Tentative dates for submission of complete draft of the thesis manuscript and PhD defence; vi) Future career path. The PCDP serves as a guide to reach DCs' career goals and monitor IRPs. Regular discussion between the DC and his/her supervisor(s) (cf. below) during the MultiLAwa bi-annual meetings will also ensure overall quality . The DC will meet both (main) academic co-supervisors every 2 months online and their DC-SC (with the supervisor(s) from the Associated Partners) every 6 months, including once during the annual on-site network meeting. Besides regular meetings, the supervisors will provide the DC with an open-door policy , ensure the smooth scientific integration of the DC and their general well-being at the universities, at the AP(s) for the secondment(s) and at the consortium's level.
Type de contrat
école doctorale
équipe
Lexiquecontexte
The doctoral contract is embedded into Work Package 1 (WP1) ‘Multilingual communication and resources in the Digital Age: discourses, practices, stereotypes'. WP1 investigates how the concepts of Language Awareness and pluri-/multilingualism are discursively constructed, ideologically framed, and technologically mediated in digital contexts across various societal domains (e.g., media, education, industry, politics). It will provide a research-based catalogue of arguments and language ideologies, with particular attention to issues of linguistic justice, gender fairness, and inclusion. In this context, the PdH thesis investigates multilingual gender fairness in AI-generated texts.spécialité
Langues, littératures et civilisationslaboratoire
ATILF - Analyse et Traitement Informatique de la Langue Française
Mots clés
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Détail de l'offre
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Keywords
Language Awareness, Gender Stereotypes, Generative AI
Subject details
Despite major advances in GenAI, stereotyping and biases are ubiquitous in texts generated by AI technologies, which runs counter to a European society committed to gender equality. The doctoral contract will: 1) investigate texts generated by leading LLMs (e.g. OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, Mistral's Le Chat) in terms of gender fairness with a focus on languages other than EN (e.g. DA, FR, DE); 2) explore the impact of linguistic factors (i.e. linguistic bias), specifically the effects of grammatically un/gendered languages and the masculine default, on gendered representations using corpus linguistic methods; 3) reveal how AI tools echo and reinforce human bias as well as raise Critical Multilingual Language Awareness among users and developers of how LLMs index gender-related structures of power; 4) contribute to enhancing the dialogue between linguists and computer scientists to confront sexism in GenAI technologies with the Associated Partners.
Profil du candidat
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Candidate profile
The Doctoral Candidate is expected to
– have the potential to conduct research of excellent quality , as demonstrated by initial academic work such as the master's thesis, and
– if applicable – presentations at conferences, awareness-raising activities or publications.
– be interested in working in a multilingual, interdisciplinary and international research environment.
– have excellent communication skills in German and English (at least B2).
– be willing to undertake international research secondments and travels.
See details: https://www.multilawa.eu/recruitment-for-applying/general-information/
Applications should be sent as a single PDF file to application@multilawa.eu. For more details, cf. the project website under 'Application process': https://www.multilawa.eu/recruitment-for-applying/application-process/
Référence biblio
Donmall, B. G. (ed.), 1985. Language Awareness: NCLE Reports and Papers, 6. CILT.
Ducel, F. / Névéol, A. / Fort, K., 2024. “you'll be a nurse, my son!” automatically assessing gender biases in autoregressive language models in
french and italian. Language Resources and Evaluation, pages 1–29.
Garret, P. / Cots, J. M. (eds), 2018. The Routledge Handbook of Language Awareness. Routledge – Taylor & Francis.
Hawkins, E., 1984. Awareness of Language: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press.
Joshi, P. et al., 2020. The State and Fate of Linguistic Diversity and Inclusion in the NLP World. In : Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Online. Association for Computational Linguistics, 6282–6293.
Krogager Andersen, L., 2024. Unfolding Language Awareness in a Plurilingual Context: A Study of Metalinguistic, Practical and Critical Language Awareness. Modern Language Journal, 108(1), 353-380.
O'Connor, S. / Liu, H., 2023. Gender bias perpetuation and mitigation in AI technologies. In: AI & SOCIETY, 2045-2057.
Policy Primer – The AI Language Gap. Considerations on the Multilingual Capabilities of AI Language Models, published by the Cohere Labs team, 2024.
UNESCO, IRCAI, 2024. Challenging systematic prejudices: an Investigation into Gender Bias in Large Language Models (Open Access).
Wang, W. / Liu, X., 2024. A review of language awareness (2020–2024): Current trends and future directions. In: Journal of Language Teaching. 4. 1-8.
Zhao, J. et al. 2017. Men Also Like Shopping: Reducing Gender Bias Amplification using Corpus-level Constraints. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing. Association for Computational Linguistics, 2979–2989.