Computational Linguistics M.A. program

Master of Arts (M.A.) with a concentration in Computational Linguistics 

The M.A. in Computational Linguistics prepares linguistics students for challenging careers in industrial and research settings. In fact, there are many companies and research centers in the greater New York area that are focused on Internet search engine technologies, human speech recognition and synthesis, extracting and mining information available online, designing software that can analyze/process human writing, or developing educational applications.  The program is designed for students with only basic familiarity with computers or programming, and the curriculum is designed to provide students with a core set of programming skills, solid foundation in major sub-­‐fields of linguistics, and an understanding of modern developments in the field of computational linguistics.

The dramatic growth of the Digital Humanities (DH) over the past half dozen years has helped scholars re-imagine the very nature and forms of academic research and teaching across a range of scholarly disciplines, encompassing the arts, the interpretive social sciences, and traditional humanities subject areas. This course will explore the history of the digital humanities, focusing especially on the diverse pioneering projects and core texts that ground this innovative methodological and conceptual approach to scholarly inquiry and teaching.  It will also emphasize ongoing debates in the digital humanities, such as the problem of defining the digital humanities, the question of whether DH has (or needs) theoretical grounding, controversies over new models of peer review for digital scholarship, issues related to collaborative labor on digital projects, and the problematic questions surrounding research involving “big data.” The course will also emphasize the ways in which DH has helped transform the nature of academic teaching and pedagogy in the contemporary university with its emphasis on collaborative, student-centered and digital learning environments and approaches. Along the way, we will discuss broad social, legal and ethical questions and concerns surrounding digital media and contemporary culture, including privacy, intellectual property, and open/public access to knowledge and scholarship. Students will be expected to participate actively in class discussions and online postings (including on blogs and wikis) and to research and write a final multimedia presentation on a key topic in the digital humanities. Students completing the course will gain broad knowledge about and understanding of the emerging role of the digital humanities across several academic disciplines and will begin to learn some of the fundamental skills used often in digital humanities projects.