MSc in Digital Linguistics

Do you want to know how a computer translator, voice assistant, and search services work from the inside? Are you going to take part in the development of new machine systems designed for text analysis and live speech? Join the Digital Linguistics master program.

This program reveals the models of language theory, Big Data analysis, theory and practice of machine translation, algorithms for automatic text improvement. The students experiment with the phenomenon of speech, voice recognition, automated text analysis, develop digital language guides and other pioneering technologies.

Why should you choose this program?

The program combines the curriculum of two fields of study: Information technologies and Linguistics. You will comprehend and analyze linguistic materials and confidently apply advanced artificial intelligence technologies even if you start from scratch. We take a very broad view of digital linguistics, from theoretical investigations to practical natural language processing applications, ranging across linguistic areas like computational semantics and pragmatics, discourse, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and applications including machine translation, question answering, and sentiment analysis.

The program offers two main professional tracks: Machine translation and Linguistic digital technologies in business. Machine translation track covers several important aspects: natural language processing applications; automatic translation of text using statistics; study of language at all levels, such as relations between words, part of speech tagging, syntactic parsing and anaphora resolution; translation tools for professional translators; machine learning for language processing, computer techniques for automatically classifying natural language texts, for NLP tasks such as making summaries of text automatically. Linguistic digital technologies in business provide engagement in areas such as text technology and linguistic data resources, grammar technology and linguistic theory, dialogue technology, and spoken interaction. The practical side of language technology is associated with computational linguistics. Important topics are empirical methods and data collection, statistics in modeling linguistic phenomena, and machine learning. Applications involving language technology are defining contemporary business culture: document relevance ranking and filtering (in e.g. search engines and social media), automatic translation, writers' aids, business intelligence, and profiling of individuals. The core of language technology are methods for automatically analyzing texts with a sensitivity for their linguistic structure and content.

These two options give additional opportunities to personalize education and even launch your own startup. Every student can draw up a personal academic plan, according to the individual educational aims with a unique set of disciplines.

The program is project-based. You will develop skills in research projects, gain experience in using mathematical methods to create Natural Language Processing applications, including speech recognition, artificial intelligence, machine translation, big data, automated text analysis, and web search in a wide variety of research labs informal workshops on digital linguistics.

You will participate in hands-on practical training grounded in theory and research, which will enable you to pursue a specialist career in industry or academic research. We have a wide network of contacts in the industry from which you will be able to benefit. Our graduates take positions within the language processing and human language technology industries, as well as in related areas such as translation, software development, and information and communication technologies. It should be noted that digital linguistics is a skill that is increasingly sought after by many companies from technological backgrounds.

Partners

• NTI Center and World-Class Research Center “Advanced Digital Technologies” SPbPU
• Translation company "Literra"
• T-Service company
• EGO Translating Company
• Translation company "Janus"
• Lappenranta University of Technology (LUT)
• Huawei LLC
• Gazprom Neft LLC
• LLC "Tetrakub"