MA Computational Linguistics

Computational technologies are increasingly present in daily life, from voice-enabled smartphone assistants to predictive text input to machine translation technologies. From an academic viewpoint, CL is the scientific study of language from a computational perspective, living at the intersection of language and technology. Students develop keen skills in linguistics and linguistic analysis. This knowledge can then be applied to the design of computational systems for automating linguistic analysis. At UNT we place a particular focus on how computational methods can support the work of documenting endangered languages, linking two of our department's strengths.

Computational Linguistics (CL) is a rapidly growing field in the high-tech sector, critical for the development of technologies such as voice-enabled smartphones (e.g. Siri, Cortana) and home assistants (e.g. Alexa). IBM’s Jeopardy-winning Watson system is another example of what CL can do.

Yet another application area is text analytics for market analysis. This concentration is specifically intended to address a growing need for language processing skills, particularly those associated with the rapid growth of artificial intelligence/cognitive technologies.

Systems like Siri or Alexa are built on a pipeline of language processing technologies, ranging from voice and speech recognition to language understanding and automatic question answering. Developing such technologies is a complex process that requires knowledge from both Linguistics and Computer Science.

This program will equip students with the research design and technology skills to apply their linguistics studies to real-world problems.