M.S. Program in Language Technologies

Objective

The Language Technologies Institute, a world leader in the areas of speech processing, language processing, information retrieval, machine translation, machine learning, and computational biology, offers a two-year Masters in Language Technologies (MLT) degree. The MLT program consists of courses, including lectures, labs and seminars, as well as directed research and project work. Most MLT students are affiliated with an advisor's research project in which they gain hands-on experience with advanced research and software that extends the state of the art. An optional Master's Thesis project may also be chosen. The LTI's MLT program is a research-oriented degree. Many of our MLT students publish papers at the top international conferences in their field, and many of our MLT graduates continue on to PhD programs at the LTI or other top universities.   The MLT program is also appropriate for students wanting to gain experience for industrial jobs in the increasingly important fields of speech processing, information retrieval, language processing, machine translation, and computational biology. The LTI is well-known for large-scale projects that provide hands-on experience creating software that extends the state of the art. Graduates of the LTI's MLT program are highly recruited by industry and government.

M.S. Program

The Masters in Language Technologies (MLT) curriculum is targeted primarily toward a professional degree; with some modifications and enhancements, it also forms the course-based component of the Ph.D. program. We expect some of the more research-oriented MLT students to apply for continuing studies into their Ph.D., with most of their MLT courses and hands-on work being credited towards the Ph.D.. The program duration is two years (24 months), students are required to do 2 summers of research during this time in order to complete degree requirements. Students should expect to graduate in August of the 2nd year.

MLT-Approved Courses

The curriculum for the Masters in Language Technologies will consist of 120 or more course units, at least 96 of which must be selected from this list of MLT-approved courses (most will be 12 units/course), which include the hands-on self-paced laboratory and the 24-unit Software Engineering for LT. These courses assume knowledge of programming and data structures. All students should have a faculty advisor, with whom to discuss and agree upon the actual set of courses to be taken, subject to the above constraint, and consistent with the student's area of specialization. Directed research is an integral part of the MLT program; MLT students will carry out directed research during the course of their studies, with guidance from their faculty advisors. Most of the LTI courses are offered once a year, although in some cases some courses may be taught every other year.

After 96 or more units are selected from the LTI list, the remaining units to reach 120 may also be taken from the LTI list, or with approval of the faculty advisor, from any other senior to-graduate-level course offered at CMU. Up to 12 of these additional units can be in the form of directed study. Depending on a student's interests, electives may be taken from the LTI, the Computer Science Department, or other CMU or Pitt departments. Students interested in speech should consider speech-oriented electives; other areas of interest include Linguistics, Statistics, and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI).

Masters Thesis Option

There is now a separate document describing the optional Masters Thesis.

Model Curricula

The following give an example of a possible student schedule. THESE ARE ONLY EXAMPLE CURRICULA! They are not meant to apply to every case, or even most cases. (except for the 2 summers of required research)

For application information, see the LTI ``How to Apply'' page.