Computational Linguistics (also called Natural Language Processing, abbreviated as NLP) is a field of vital importance in the information age. With growing amounts of speech and text data, the demand keeps increasing for automated tools to understand human language and NLP specialists to develop and operate these tools.

In industry, Computational Linguistics techniques are being widely used in search engines, digital libraries, speech recognition systems, and data mining toolkits. The leading data analysis companies like SAS and SPSS all have added text analysis components to their products. Many open-source NLP toolkits have also been available. Companies with large amount of text data need NLP specialists to develop in-house tools or use off-the-shelf tools to analyze their corpora.

Computational Linguistics also plays a critical role in the latest data-driven scholarship in computational social sciences and digital humanities. Humanist scholars and social scientists are increasingly using large corpora to make robust inferences in their research. Scientific literature, government documents, and user-generated content in social media are just a few examples of commonly used corpora. NLP tools are used by students and scholars in sociology, journalism, and communication fields to slice and dice large document collections, identify the main themes and opinions of different parties. The tools and techniques described above are also widely used in national defense and security agencies, as well as law enforcement agencies at the local, national, and international levels.

The knowledge of such tools and their development and use is becoming more critical to employees in these fields, which is another reason SU is a strong candidate for a computational linguistics program.

In order to receive the Masters of Science in Computational Linguistics, students must complete at least 36-credit hours of coursework, which includes 3 or 6 credits in an internship, and earn a cumulative grade point average of at least 3.0

A total of nine courses are required: five LIN courses (601 Introductory Linguistic Analysis, 611 Semantics of Human Language, 641 Syntactic Analysis, 651 Morphological Analysis, and 741 Advanced Syntax), two 3 CPS courses in (681 Explorations in Computing and Programming, and 688 Algorithms for Computational Journalism and Linguistics), two IST courses (657 Basics of Information Retrieval Systems, and 664 Natural Language Processing) plus a 3 or 6 credit IST internship.

Please note that we offer rolling admissions.

• Completed Syracuse University Graduate School Application
• Resume
• Personal Statement - include background and interest in the program
• Official transcripts - from graduate and undergraduate studies
• 3 Letters of Recommendation
• Application Fee
• GRE Scores: Required
• TOEFL Scores: 580 (written test), 237 (computer-based test), 92-93 (internet-based test) minimum for unconditional admissions