The Corpling lab in the Department of Linguistics at Georgetown University (Washington, DC), directed by Amir Zeldes, is looking for qualified candidates for a PhD in Computational Linguistics, to start in Fall 2026. Applicants will be most competitive for the PhD program if they have prior experience in Linguistics, Computer Science, or a related field; are proficient in basic programming; and articulate a clear area of research specialization that they wish to pursue, which aligns with research at the lab. Georgetown also offers a 2-year MS in Computational Linguistics for students wishing to gain a foundation in the field. The application deadline for the PhD program is December 1, 2025 – see details here:

https://linguistics.georgetown.edu/programs/apply/

The lab focuses on research about computational models of discourse, annotated corpus resource creation and Natural Language Processing, especially for low-resource languages and applications in the Digital Humanities. Some recent research topics have included:

• Understanding relative salience in discourse using LLMs
• Modeling discourse relations expressing causality, argumentation and temporality
• The study of different types of anaphoric relations between entities and events
• Creating and benchmarking models for multilingual discourse understanding
• Building datasets and tools for under-resourced and historical languages (especially for Coptic)

For more on our research see the lab’s website and Amir’s homepage linked above.

Students in the Computational Linguistics program benefit from a range of courses in NLP and computational modeling techniques, as well as foundational courses in Linguistics. Applicants must hold at least a bachelor’s degree by Fall 2026. PhD students in the Department (domestic as well as international) benefit from a 5-year funding package including a stipend, tuition scholarship and health insurance. For questions please contact amir.zeldes@georgetown.edu.