Språkteknologi, masterprogram

Have you ever wondered how Google manages to find relevant documents, even documents that do not contain any of the words you used in your search? Have you ever wished to get an answer to a question rather than a list of documents? Have you ever talked to a conversational assistant on your smartphone, or to a computer on the phone about travel plans and wished you could make it work better? Have you ever used translation on the web and wondered how it could be improved?

These are just some of the questions the students enrolled in our Master in Language Technology programme will be working on together with researchers from the University of Gothenburg and Chalmers.

Language technology is about getting computers to use human language and involves collaboration between a number of different fields such as linguistics, languages, computer science and artificial intelligence. It is not only about research. Lately we have seen an increasing demand of applications like Apple´s Siri and IBM´s Watson in the market. These are just two examples of brilliant commercial tools in language technology .

Contents

The first semester of the first year the students take two introductory courses in both programming for language technological applications and relevant concepts and theories from formal linguistics. They will also get overviews of the main areas of modern language technology. This will be followed by a general introduction to natural language processing, NLP (the nuts and bolts of getting computers to understand and process human language) and programming for NLP.

The second semester starts with both dialogue systems and statistical methods used in language technology. It continues with courses on processing the structure of language, syntax and its meaning (semantics). The first semester of the second year offers a choice from a variety of courses in language technology and related area.

The final semester of the two year degree is entirely devoted to project work.

Students normally conduct their final projects with and industrial partner or at one of the the following research groups associated the university:

CLASP (the Centre for Linguistic Theory and Studies in Probability) at the Department of Philosophy, Linguistics and Theory of Science

Språkbanken (the Language Bank) at the Department of Swedish

The Division of Functional Programming at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering

The Division of Data Science at the Department of Computer Science and Engineering

Career

A language technology specialist can work as a developer, researcher or project manager in diverse areas such as text analysis, information retrieval, automatic translation, speech technology, user interface design, and game development.