Computational linguistics (CL) is a discipline at the interface between linguistics, computer science, and psychology that deals with the development of computational models of the human language faculty.
The rapid growth of the Internet brings new challenges to language technology. About 80% of the electronic data we deal with today is in the form of text. However, this form is intended for human reading, not processing and reasoning by computers. Thus, Computational Linguistics techniques are necessary for turning the wealth of digital information into structured knowledge. Moreover, the increasing multilinguality of the web adds new exciting but challenging issues to our discipline. This information can only be mastered with the help of multilingual tools for fast and accurate indexing and searching. Tools for crosslingual information processing and knowledge management will surmount language barriers for applications such as e-commerce, education and international transactions.
One of the oldest such programs in the world, the Computational Linguistics program at U of I offers a broad range of research areas that will give students a solid foundation in this discipline. Students are trained by leading researchers with extensive industry experience in both theoretical and applied areas areas such as, computational morphology, text-to-speech synthesis, pronunciation modeling, computational semantics, information extraction, and their applications in domains such as dialogue systems and automatic question answering. Active ongoing projects include work on multilingual named entity detection and transliteration, language modeling for colloquial Arabic, second-language fluency assessment and detection, computational models of writing systems and their relevance psycholinguistic models of reading, semantic role labeling and corpus-based methods in semantic inference.
The linguistics faculty involved in CL research --- Richard Sproat and Roxana Girju --- have close collaborations with faculty in other units with interests in speech and language processing. These include (in Computer Science) Dan Roth and ChengXiang Zhai; (in Library and Information Science) Les Gasser and Bryan Heidorn; (in Electrical and Computer Engineering) Mark Hasegawa-Johnson; and (in Psychology) Kay Bock.
Students with an interest in speech and language processing may be interested in the new Certificate Program in Language and Speech Processing. There are also various opportunities for support as research assistants in funded research.