MS in Computational Linguistics

The Departments of Linguistics and Computer Science and Engineering jointly participate in a Master of Science in Computational Linguistics (Natural Language Processing). The mission of the program is to prepare students for a career in the Human Language Technologies industry. This program is on the STEM OPT extension list (CIP number 30.1801). If you are a current UB Linguistics PhD student interested in pursuing the MS as well, please view the PhD Applicants to MS page. 

MS students are encouraged to seek internships they are interested in via Bullseye, or to participate in our local Summer internship in the Natural Language Understanding Laboratory at the Department of Biomedical Sciences. We also have a relationshiop with Comcast’s Applied AI group as a potential source of Summer internships for our MS students.

There are currently eight students in the MS program, two of which are also pursuing a PhD in Linguistics.

• Ms alumna Liz Soper (2022) has been hired as a Computational Linguist at Claira.
  
• MS alumna Laura Hambrige (2022) has been hired as a Computational Linguist, working on Research and Development in Machina Cognita Technologies (California).
  
• MS alumna Christina Dahn (2022) has taken a research position in Computational Social Science at GESIS, in Cologne.
  
• MS alumnus Eden Schaffer-Neitz (2022) was hired as an NLP Research Engineer at BlueHalo Intelligent Automation Inc.
  
• MS alumna Yutong Yang (2021) was hired by Optessa USA Inc, as an Application Specialist.
  
• The UB project PROTO was awarded third place in the hightly competitive Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge competition. The Czech Technical University came in first place and Stanford University in secod. Congratulations to everyone!
  
• MS student Laura Hambridge was very busy during 2021: she worked as an RA for a machine learning project at the School of Political Science, with Professor Amy Semet. At the same time she had another RAship to work on the Tesserae project, at with Professor Neil Coffee, Department of Classics. Laura also interned at the Natural Language Understanding Laboratory, at the School of Bioinformatics, with Professor Peter Elkin. In the fall, she will be an RA in Linguistics, with professor Juergen Bohnemeyer.
  
• The UB project PROTO is now in the finals of the Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge. Keeping our fingers crossed!
• MS alumnus  Ali Alshehri has been working at Apple Siri as a contractor since October 2020. In the Summer of 2021 he was hired full time as a Language Engineer, working on Siri's text-to-speech technology.
• MS alumnus  Jude LaFleur  was hired as an AI Engineer 2 at IQVIA in June 2021. In the previous summeer he had completed an internship at The Research Foundation for SUNY, working with the Natural Language Understanding Laboratory at the Department of Biomedical Sciences.
  
• MS (and PhD) students Liz Soper and Erin Pacquetet, along with a few other students at UB, are participating in the Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge, under the guidance of Professor Rohini Srihari (CSE). This challenge focuses on designing and implementing conversational AI systems (chatbots), and it comes with a $250K research grant to develop a prototype. Nine teams were selected for this first round, and the next involves a $1M prize. The UB project (named PROTO) focuses on empathetic chatbots that leverage large volumes of dynamic content in order to generate longer, productive conversations on various topics including health.
  
• MS student Stephanie Richter co-authored two conference papers in 2020 (one for the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society and another for the Annual Meeting of the Society for Computation in Linguistics), and was accepted into the PhD in Linguistics program at the University of Rochester, starting Fall 2021.
• MS graduate Mitchell Kristie has accepted the position of Artificial Intelligence Enablement Team Lead at Welocalize on the Spring of 2020.
• MS (and PhD) student Liz Soper is at Data Science NLP intern at Ancestry, in Salt Lake City during the Summer of 2021. In the Summer of 2020 she completed a Data Science internship at Vail Systems, Inc, and in the summer before that she interned at the Natural Language Understanding Laboratory at the Department of Biomedical Sciences.
  
• MS graduate Xuejiao Chen accepted a position as an assistant NLP Engineer at the Institute of Information Science of the China Electronics Technology Group Corporation on the Spring of 2020.
• MS graduate Soo Hyun Ryu has been accepted to the Psychology program at Michigan University, starting Fall 2020.
• MS graduates Mengyang-Qiu and Xuejiao Chen have turned a term paper into a published conference paper: Qiu, M., Chen, X., Liu, M., Parvathala, K., Patil, A. & Park, J. (2019) "Improving precision of grammatical error correction with a cheat sheet", in Proceedings of the 14th Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications, collocated with the 2019 ACL Conference.
• MS student Soo Hyun Ryu will graduate in the Spring of 2019 and will be working as a researcher in the NLP*CL Lab at Korea Advanced Institute for Science and Technology (KAIST) as well as a Grammar Developer for Lionbridge.  She also presented a paper entitled "On the interaction between dependency frequency and thematic fit in sentence processing" at the 2019 Annual Meeting of the Society for Computation in Linguistics, NYC.
  
• MS/PhD student Erika Bellingham completed an internship at Google, as an Analytical Linguist Intern (Intent Schema Team) from June 2018 to August 2018. She worked on natural language systems for the Google Assistant, and used linguistic analysis to improve Natural Language Understanding and Natural Language Generation systems. She was hired as a Linguist by Google in 2020.
  
• MS/PhD student Hao Sun has graduated in the Spring of 2018, and was hired as an Artificial Intelligence Scientist by Astound, AI., a startup located in Menlo Park, California. Later he moved to Pearson, also at Menlo Park.
  
• MS student Dianna Radpour took a leave during the Spring of 2018 to participate in an internship in the Reiken Institute (Tokyo, Japan). In the Fall of 2018 she graduated, and moved on to a PhD program at the University Colorado.

Ideal applicants to the MS have :

• good letters of recommendation
• a strong cover letter
• good grades (including GRE scores)
  
• prior training/experience relevant to the MS (e.g. background in linguistics, computer science, and/or mathematics)

The MS degree also requires the completion of a capstone project (either LIN600, or an expanded version of the project for an advanced CL course), which consists of a significant amount of programming and allows students to specialize in particular techniques, methodos and/or research. The project can be completed at any time during the program and can be advised by any of the following faculty. For a recent example of a project that became a published paper see https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W19-1004/.

Rui P. Chaves, Associate Professor of Linguistics

Rachael Hinkle, Assistant Professor of Political Science

Yingjie Hu, Assistant Professor of Geography

Cassandra Jacobs, Assistant Professor of Linguistics

Jean-Pierre Koenig, Professor of Linguistics

Rohini Srihari, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering