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 state-of-the-art software. An optional Master's Thesis project may also be chosen.

The MLT program is a research-oriented degree. Many of our students publish papers at the top international conferences in their field, and many of our graduates continue on to Ph.D. programs at the LTI or other top universities.   The MLT program is also appropriate for students who want to gain experience for industrial jobs in the increasingly important fields of speech processing, information retrieval, language processing, machine translation, and computational biology. Graduates of the MLT program are highly recruited by industry and government.

Program Description

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, with most of their MLT courses and hands-on work being credited towards the Ph.D. The program duration is two years (24 months), and students are required to complete two summers of research during this time frames. Students should expect to graduate in August of the 2nd year.

Students and faculty interacting at the 2008 Student Research Symposium

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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-unit courses, including the hands-on, self-paced laboratory and the 24 units of 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 another 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 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

The optional Masters Thesis

Model Curricula

An example of a possible schedule: