MA/MSc in Linguistics: Language and Communication Technologies (Double Degree Program) University of Groningen

How do we cope with the information overload of modern media? What is the best way to collect data in a multilingual environment? Find out in this international Double Degree track.

The track in Language and Communication Technologies combines Theoretical Linguistics and Computer Science. You will study language technology in a multi-lingual setting.

The two-year training is part of the prestigious international Erasmus Mundus program. The first year you will start in Groningen. You will finish the program with a stay at one of our partner universities in the second year. After completing the track, you will receive two Master's degrees: a degree in Linguistics in Groningen and a second Master's degree depending on the partner university you chose to stay at.

The program consists of compulsory and optional courses. In this way, you can design the program to fit your interests. In addition, you will do a research project and write a Master's thesis.

Language and Communication Technologies is an Erasmus Mundus program.

Why study this program in Groningen?

• A unique combination of theoretical linguistics and computer-science research in a multi-lingual setting.
• Rapidly evolving area of study with excellent career opportunities, both in industry and academia.
• Erasmus Mundus Master's program.

Research

The EM LCT courses are predominantly taught by researchers from the computational linguistics group of the Centre for Language and Cognition. The group specializes in automatic syntactic analysis (of Dutch and other languages), automatic semantic interpretation, machine translation, and authorship studies. In various projects, we have contributed to syntactic parsing of Dutch: Alpino parser for Dutch, Universal Dependencies treebank for Dutch, Deep semantic interpretation (parallel meaning bank), and dialectology (visualizing dialects).

Master students are actively encouraged to become involved in research, either through research assistantships or by participating in working groups that participate in shared tasks, such as authorship attribution (Groningen Lightweight Authorship Attribution) or language identification (The power of character n-grams in Native Language Identification)

Year 1

• Basic Statistics (5 EC)
• Corpus Analysis (5 EC)
• Syntactic and Semantic Theory (10 EC)
• Elective courses (for example Language Modelling, Learning from Data, Multichannel Management, Neuro-Imaging, and Language) (40 EC)

Year 2

• Exchange Programme (30 EC)
• ResMa Thesis Linguistics, Thesis Class (30 EC)

Program options

Master's placement (specialization)

During this Master's track, you can follow a placement for 10 ECTS credit points.

It is your responsibility to find a placement yourself, but the Mobility Office can offer help with this where necessary. Click the link above to find examples of placements completed by other Master's students.

Master's Honours Programme (honors program)

The Master's Honours Programme was developed especially for students who want to get more from their studies.

It is a program worth 15 ECTS that is followed in addition to the standard Master's program. It is a one-year interdisciplinary program that is designed to introduce students to various aspects of leadership.

Study abroad

• Study abroad is required

Job prospects

After graduation, you are well prepared for a career in Information Technology. You can work on subjects such as web search, information management, and human-computer dialogue systems. You can also continue your career in research, for instance as a Ph.D. student at a university.

Job examples

A career in the IT industry.