Research Internship: Improving Grounding in Language Models

2 weeks ago

Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, United Kingdom Microsoft Full time £40,000 - £60,000 per year

Overview
Microsoft Research Cambridge (UK) is seeking a research intern with experience in linguistics, philosophy of language, natural language processing, and human-computer interaction to join a research project at the foundations of Human-AI interaction.

Responsibilities
The intern will lead a
literature review
across linguistics and the philosophy of language to
develop a taxonomy
of grounding and support relations for AI‑generated statements. They will contribute definitions, examples, and decision rules that make the taxonomy operational for both human annotators and LLM‑as‑judge evaluators.

The intern will design a
benchmark
: selecting suitable source corpora (including recent groundedness datasets), constructing statement–source pairs, and writing clear annotation guidelines. They will run a
human annotation
study
, potentially crowdsourcing. Where applicable, they will help prepare bespoke annotation tooling.

The intern will
evaluate frontier models'
ability to classify grounding categories and compare LLM‑as‑judge performance to human raters. They will co‑author an academic paper describing the taxonomy, dataset, and findings.

Qualifications
Required/Minimum Qualifications:

  • Is currently enrolled in or has recently completed a PhD program in human-computer interaction, natural language processing, linguistics, philosophy of language.
  • Experience in coding for research prototypes, data processing, and simple statistical analysis.
  • Is comfortable reviewing and engaging with interdisciplinary literature.
  • High fluency in spoken and written English.

Preferred/Additional Qualifications

  • Experience developing AI benchmarks.
  • Experience in running human annotation or crowdsourcing studies.
  • Experience building prototypes that leverage language model APIs.
  • Experience in prompt design and engineering.
  • Research publications at top conferences and journals in HCI/ML/NLP.

This position will be open for a minimum of 5 days, with applications accepted on an ongoing basis until the position is filled.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, citizenship, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, immigration status, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran or military status, race, ethnicity, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable local laws, regulations and ordinances. If you need assistance with religious accommodations and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application process, read more about
requesting accommodations.

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