📍
Cambridge, UK

Research Internship: Improving Grounding in Language Models (NLP, HCI)

Internship
Technology & Digital
Software engineering
Posted:
December 29, 2025

Microsoft

Software, cloud & services
86.9
Palpable Score
Apply >view company >

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:  

Preferred/Additional Qualifications:

About the company

Microsoft

Company overview
Microsoft is a global technology company best known for Windows, Microsoft 365, Azure cloud services, and developer tools like GitHub and Visual Studio. Microsoft also builds consumer and enterprise products across gaming (Xbox), search and advertising, cybersecurity, and AI products such as Copilot. Microsoft sells mainly to enterprises, governments, developers, and consumers through a mix of subscriptions, cloud usage, and device and software licensing. Microsoft operates at massive global scale and runs large, repeatable hiring pipelines for both students and full-time roles.

Locations and presence

Microsoft has major offices and engineering hubs across North America, Europe, and Asia, with a large global footprint across many cities listed on Microsoft Careers. Microsoft has been tightening hybrid expectations, including an update to three in-office days per week that starts rolling out from the Puget Sound area from late February 2026.

Palpable Score

86.9
/ 100
Microsoft offers some of the clearest and most repeatable early-career entry points in tech, spanning first-year internships, new-grad hiring, sales and customer-facing early-in-profession tracks, and apprenticeship-style routes. The hiring process is structured and widely documented, and learning support is visible across multiple programs, though team-to-team variation still matters once someone lands. Pay tends to be competitive with strong benefits, and outcomes look positive, but Microsoft does not publish consistent early-career retention and promotion metrics.
view full company profile >

Related jobs

📍
Stellenbosch, South Africa
MSCI
Financial Data Associate
January 27, 2026
view job >
📍
Mumbai, India
MSCI
Financial Data Associate
January 27, 2026
view job >
📍
Stellenbosch, South Africa
MSCI
Financial Data Analyst
January 27, 2026
view job >
📍
Bengaluru, India
S&P Global
Analyst, Tech Enablement
January 27, 2026
view job >