BSc Honours in Computational Linguistics (QG14)

Computational linguistics is the science that tries to make machines understand language. Language understanding has a wide range of applications, not only for computers, but also for mobile devices such as mobile phones or personal organizers. Computers that are able to produce and, to a certain extent, understand language are already available on the market as reading and writing aids for the visually impaired or aids for translators and the demand for such devices is on the increase. For example, surgeons still spend a lot of their valuable time writing medical notes after a surgical procedure when they could just dictate them as the operation happens! There is a lot of information available on the web or in databases but retrieving it is not always easy. It would be great if Google searches were powered by a computer program clever enough to understand the meaning of query and retrieve just the information you need, no more, no less!

So how do computational linguists go about creating the talking machine? A great deal of the work of the computational linguist focuses on building artificial models of a natural language (e.g. English, Hindi, Arabic are examples of natural languages), expressed in a mathematical formulae which are fed into computer programmes. Computational linguists attempt to compute all aspects of human communication: the sounds we produce, how we link sounds to produce words, how we link words to meanings and organise them in sentences, how children develop language, the evolution of a language through time and many other aspects of human communication. Some computational linguists focus mainly on machines that understand language (speech recognition) others work on the difficult task of programming machines to produce language (speech synthesis).

This degree is a perfect blend of intellectually challenging theoretical ideas and hands-on practical projects. The School of Informatics is unrivalled in the UK and a world leader in the teaching and research of computational linguistics. It boasts over 20 years of research in this field and teaching at postgraduate level.

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