MS in Computational Linguistics

Professor Sargur Srihari, Professor of Computer Science & Engineering, teaching students about Deep Learning and Natural Language Processing

Overview

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 Alumni 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 a 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 at 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.

Application Deadlines

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.

Online Application

MS in Computational Linguistics

Application Fee Waiver

The graduate application fee is $75 U.S. (payable online or by check or money order made payable to the University at Buffalo). Students may be eligible for an application fee waiver courtesy of the CAS Dean's Office. To learn more, please visit the College of Arts and Sciences. If they qualify for a waiver, students may then submit their MS application for formal review without the application fee, provided the fee waiver application has also been submitted and accepted.

Advising Faculty

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 Shihari, Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and Adjunct Professor of Electrical Engineering

Degree Requirements

Credit Hours: 36
Required Linguistics Courses	Phonetics (LIN 531) Syntax I (LIN 515) Advanced Syntax (such as LIN 526: Comparative Syntactic Theories; LIN 552: Head Driven Phrase Structure Grammar; LIN 535: Syntax 2; or LIN 614: Current Syntactic Theory) Semantics I (LIN 538) Semantics II (LIN 543)
Required Computer Science Courses	Introduction to Computer Science for non-majors I (CSE 503) Introduction to Computer Science for non-majors II (CSE 504) Information Retrieval (CSE 535) Machine Learning (CSE 574) or Introduction of the Theory of Computation (CSE 596) Computational Linguistics (LIN/CSE 567) Advanced Topics in Computational Linguistics (LIN/CSE 667)
Electives*	Statistics (such as LIN 624: Quantitative Methods in Linguistics; PSC 508: Basic Statistics for Social Sciences; or COM 504: Quantitative Foundations of Communication) Disorders of Memory (CDS 687) Fundamentals of Programming Languages (CSE 505) Analysis of Algorithms (CSE 531) Introduction to pattern recognition (CSE 555) Knowledge Representation (CSE 563) Topics in visualization (CSE 566) Introduction to Computer Vision and Image Processing (CSE 573) Machine Learning (CSE 574) Introduction to the Theory of Computation (CSE 596) Data mining and bioinformatics (CSE 601) Advanced Information Retrieval (CSE 635) Advanced Machine Learning (CSE 674) Discourse pragmatics (LIN 504) Corpus Linguistics (LIN 514) Head-driven Phrase-Structure Grammar (LIN 552) Psycholinguistics (PSY 642) Internship (LIN 599)

*To be chosen in agreement with each student’s advisor; other classes may be taken with approval of the Director of Graduate Studies in the concentration for Computational Linguistics, Professor Rui P. Chaves.

Required courses may be waived if a corresponding course has already been taken. For information on Computer Science courses, please visit the Department of Computer Science and Engineering.