萨塞克斯大学PhD Position in EPSRC collaborative studentship: Natural Language Processing for Improving Support for Young People’s Mental Health申请条件要求-申请方
主办方
萨塞克斯大学
PhD直招介绍
About the Project
This project will be in collaboration with Tellmi( https://www.tellmi.help/ ), an organisation specialising in providing digital mental health support for young people. Their app provides a safe space for young people to talk about their experiences; pre-moderated, anonymous peer support; pre-emptive counsellor intervention and access to a directory of specialist resources. Previous collaborations with Tellmi have focussed on using Natural Language Processing to support the moderation process as well as finding and recommending resources within the directory based on user posts. Now Tellmi would like to investigate using NLP technology for directly answering user questions given certain constraints: user data (including posts) is highly sensitive making certain cloud services off-limits, building and running large language models locally is prohibitively expensive, users are vulnerable and may be at high risk if given incorrect information. Given these constraints, how much can NLP and other AI technology be used to speed up response times in a scalable way?
Recent innovations in Natural Language Processing, including Large Language Models (LLMs), have already made it possible to create AI chatbots which can engage in conversation and answer questions. However, due to their nature, large language models have a tendency to “hallucinate” and make things up. Responses also tend to be very fluent and persuasive which make it hard for humans (and technology) to identify the incorrect information. Some progress has been made with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) which encourages the LLM to base its answer on trusted text, as well as prompt engineering and self-reflection / evaluation. It is expected that this project might investigate some of these techniques and the extent to which they can mitigate against hallucinations.
This project is quite wide in possible scope and it is expected that a successful applicant will write their own project proposal which demonstrates their understanding of possible research questions and relevant literature in the field of NLP, as well as suggesting a possible project plan.
It is expected that the PhD work will focus on one or more of the research questions from an academic perspective. Methods will be developed and tested within the academic setting. Other datasets as well as data provided by the project partner, Tellmi, will be used in training and evaluation. Tellmi are offering a paid placement (which could be done on-block or part-time concurrently with the PhD) which would focus on software development and integration within their company systems.
Number of scholarships available
One
Deadline
14 February 2025 16:00
Relevant papers are:
Rummer-Downing, T. and Weeds, J. (2023). Leveraging Out-of-the-Box Retrieval Models to Improve Mental Health Support. In Proceedings of the 16th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2023) - HEALTHINF; ISBN 978-989-758-631-6; ISSN 2184-4305, SciTePress, pages 64-73. DOI: 10.5220/001163430000341
Wang, D. ; Weeds, J. and Comley, I. (2020). Improving Mental Health using Machine Learning to Assist Humans in the Moderation of Forum Posts. In Proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2020) - HEALTHINF; ISBN 978-989-758-398-8; ISSN 2184-4305, SciTePress, pages 187-197. DOI: 10.5220/0008988401870197
Peng, Q. Weir, D.and Weeds, J. 2023. Testing Paraphrase Models on Recognising Sentence Pairs at Different Degrees of Semantic Overlap. In Proceedings of the 12th Joint Conference on Lexical and Computational Semantics (*SEM 2023), pages 259–269, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Hunter, S.B., Mathews, F. and Weeds, J. 2023.Using hierarchical text classification to investigate the utility of machine learning in automating online analyses of wildlife exploitation. Ecological Informatics, Volume 75, 2023, 102076, ISSN 1574-9541, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoinf.2023.102076 .
Sponsors
These scholarships are funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC)
Contact us
For questions regarding your chosen research project, please contact the project supervisor: juliewe@sussex.ac.uk
If you have questions relating to the online application process, please contact enginf-pgr@sussex.ac.uk for the School of Informatics and Engineering.
Timetable
14th February 2025 (23:59): Deadline for applications
January to March 2025: Interviews
From late March 2025: Awards confirmed
萨塞克斯大学 PhD Position in EPSRC collaborative studentship: Natural Language Processing for Improving Support for Young People’s Mental Health项目有没有奖学金，是不是全奖Phd招生，下面我们一起看一下【大学名称】Phd的奖学金资助情况
项目资助情况
As an EPSRC student you will join a vibrant doctoral community and will benefit from:
3.5 years of funding with a a tax free living allowance at the standard Research Council rate – currently £19,237 in 2024-5 – and international or UK PhD fees
An option of a paid placement with the company
Funding for training and research expenses, such as conference trips and experimental costs
Supervision by world-leading researchers
Our Entrepreneurship Summer School and Responsible Research and Innovation workshops tailored to the needs of engineering and physical sciences researchers.
Our Researcher Development workshops and access to taught modules relevant to your project.
萨塞克斯大学Phd申请条件和要求都有哪些？PhD Position in EPSRC collaborative studentship: Natural Language Processing for Improving Support for Young People’s Mental Health项目是不是全奖？有没有奖学金？下面我们一起看一下萨塞克斯大学申请Phd直招需要具备哪些条件和要求，以及托福、雅思语言成绩要到多少才能申请。
申请要求
Applicants should have/expect to have at least a 2:1 undergraduate honours degree in a relevant subject (e.g. Computer Science) and meet our English language requirements. International and UK applicants are both eligible to apply, but in line with EPSRC regulations, international awards will be limited.
Sussex recognises the value of diversity in research communities and is committed to addressing patterns of under-representation. We recognise that a range of factors, both structural and individual, influence and impede pathways into postgraduate research in different ways. If you wish, you may write a short, optional statement offering any further contextual information affecting your pathway to postgraduate research not included elsewhere that you think is relevant to your application.
报名方式
申请链接
联系人
邮箱：enginf-pgr@sussex.ac.uk
招生人信息
Prof J Weeds
邮箱：juliewe@sussex.ac.uk
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