Have you ever wondered how personal assistants like Siri and Alexa work, or how humans interact with chatbots and apps using natural language? Are you interested in how language is structured, what its social functions are, or how to build formal models of it? If so, then this programme is for you.

Why study MA in Computational Linguistics

• Our interdisciplinary programme will enable you to acquire the theoretical understanding and practical skills you’ll need to succeed in the academic and professional fields of natural language processing and computational linguistics.
• The programme is based on an inter-departmental collaboration between the Department of Computing and the linguistics team at the Department of English and Creative Writing, giving you a chance to explore the fascinating relationship between language and technology.
• You’ll have access to modules that explore the core areas of language structure and meaning, the relationship between language, society and culture, linguistic analyses of text and speech, Natural Language Processing, core programming skills, Corpus Linguistics, as well as a further range of option modules available at the two Departments.
• You’ll gain a solid understanding of how language technologies can be applied to diverse language processing tasks and will be able to steer your studies towards your primary interests and professional ambitions.
• This program focuses on the intersection of linguistics and computation and is suitable for students coming from either of these disciplines or from related disciplines with strong interests in this domain, with good numeracy skills.

Ethical and social perspectives

Throughout the programme, we encourage you to develop an understanding of the ethical and social dimensions of computational linguistics and its applications. Our graduates will be challenged to confront the many ethical issues in artificial intelligence and computational linguistics. In the modern era of data availability, it is vital that all participants involved in the acquisition and analysis of language data are aware of potential biases and the impact of their actions on privacy, anonymity, and personal security.