This is a four-course (12 hour) graduate certificate program in Computational Linguistics. Computational Linguistics (CL) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) – often viewed as one and the same thing – are rapidly growing fields in the high-tech sector, critical for development of technologies such as voice-enabled smart phones (e.g. Siri, Cortana) and home assistants (e.g. Alexa). IBM’s Jeopardy-winning Watson system is another example of what CL can do. Yet another application area is text analytics for market analysis.

This certificate is specifically intended to address a growing need for language processing skills, particularly those associated with the rapid growth of artificial intelligence/cognitive technologies. Systems like Siri or Alexa are built on a pipeline of language processing technologies, ranging from voice and speech recognition to language understanding and automatic question answering. Developing such technologies is a complex process that requires knowledge from both linguistics and computer science.