MA Honours in Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence(QG17)

This degree is unique in the UK. It is offered jointly with Theoretical and Applied Linguistics in the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Studies.

The principal focus for the Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) degree is the following question:

'How is it that a human being can understand and produce an unlimited number of new sentences which he or she has never encountered before?'

In order to explain how languages can "work" in this way, it is necessary to see sentences as having a complex internal structure. Much of Linguistics is the study of what this structure is like, whether it be at the level of pronunciation, word-formation, grammar, meaning, or communication in social situations. The models developed can then, in principle, be used in the design of general-purpose computer programs for performing tasks that require sophisticated handling of language. Such systems are now beginning to see practical application in areas such as human-computer interfaces, automatic fact extraction from text and machine translation.

For details of degree structure and content see degree programme specification.

What is special about the Edinburgh degree programme

Firstly, this degree is unique in the UK.

The mixture of skills from Arts and Science that the Linguistics and AI students acquire also make them very employable, for instance, in a variety of management jobs.

Students can also make direct vocational use of their qualification in automatics language processing, for example. There is a growing need in the European context for automatic processing of the various European languages and there are various initiatives supported by the European Commission and European industry to develop the appropriate technology for this.