MS in Computational Linguistics

The Departments of Linguistics and Computer Science and Engineering jointly participate in a Master of Science in Computational Linguistics. 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. 

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

Student spotlight

• MS student Stephanie Richter co-authored two conference papers in 2020 (COGSCI and SCiL) and was just accepted into the PhD in Linguistics program at the University of Rochester, starting Fall 2020.
  
• MS graduate Xuejiao Chen accepted this Spring of 2020 a position as an assistant NLP Engineer at the Institute of Information Science of the China Electronics Technology Group Corporation. 
• 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. 
• MS student Soo Hyun Ryu 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.
• 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.
• 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.

MS students are encouraged to seek internships they are interested in via Bullseye, or to participate in our local internship in the Natural Language Understanding Laboratory at the Department of Biomedical Sciences.

March 1: All international MA/MS applicants

April 1: All domestic MA/MS applicants

Application reviews begin January 15 of each year, and continue throughout the spring semester. 

Ideal applicants to the MS have :

• good letters of recommendation
• a strong cover letter
• at least one of the following:
  

1.  Prior training relevant to the MS (background in linguistics, computer science, or mathematics)
2.  Experience in NLP industry
   
3.  GRE Quantitative Reasoning scores above 75% (this threshold is typical of students who have succeeded in the program). 

Applications without GRE scores (or any one of the above qualities) will still receive full consideration, and may still be admitted if the application is otherwise strong.  

The MS degree aslo requires the completion of a capstone project (LIN600), 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

Jean-Pierre Koenig, Professor of Linguistics

Rohini Srihari, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering