About this major:

Do you love learning languages? Are you interested in discovering how they work? Do you enjoy working with computers? Then Computational Linguistics may be the right program for you. Computational Linguistics is based on knowledge from Linguistics as well as from Computer Science and Cognitive Science. Computational Linguistics studies how language works in order to determine how a computer can understand and work with language. Typical applications include machine translation, automatic summarization of texts, and intelligent computer-assisted language learning. In the program, we will cover more practical applications as well as more basic techniques, such as automatic part-of-speech tagging.

In the major in Computational Linguistics, you will take foundational courses in three areas:

1. Linguistics: These courses will make you acquainted with the methods used in Linguistics for the sound level, the word level, and the sentence level.
2. Computer Science: These courses will teach you how computers work, how to program, and so forth.
3. Computational Linguistics: These courses show you how your knowledge from Linguistics and Computer Science can be combined to create the applications mentioned above.

No prior knowledge in either area is required. You have the choice of either doing a B.S. in Computational Linguistics (4 years), or opt to add another year and graduate with a M.S. in Computational Linguistics. There is also an undergraduate minor in Computational Linguistics.

Potential employers include:

• large companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM
• smaller, more focused companies or start-ups
• universities and research institutes

Career Information:

While your major does not equal your career, the career information below will help you check your level of interest in Computational Linguistics.