The Graduate Certificate in Computational Linguistics provides students with a basic education in the interdisciplinary field of computational linguistics. Computational linguists develop tools that support the interface of the person with the computer, in applications like blogs and diaries, citizen journalism and social interactions, web search and online booking systems, smart library catalogs, and the learning of foreign languages, spoken language interaction and knowledge discovery.  They do this working for companies like Google, IBM, Yahoo!, MITRE, Microsoft and Amazon as well as for various governmental organizations both military and  civilian.

The program enables students to understand core algorithms and data structures in CL, understand both symbolic and statistical methods and their appropriate use in applications. Applications include automatic text summarization, machine translation, named entity recognition (determining which items in a text map to proper names and what the type of each such name is –person, location, organization, etc.), natural language generation (converting information from computer databases into readable human language), natural language understanding (converting chunks of text into more formal representations that are easier for computer programs to manipulate),  question answering (determining an answer, given a human language question), speech recognition, and text-to-speech synthesis, among many others.

The program is the only one of its kind in the state of New Jersey. It is unusual in that it places equal emphasis on basic computer science skills and on the techniques and methods of linguistics, giving students a solid background for the job market.

Admission to the CL Program

Students interested in applying for admission to the Certificate Program in Computational Linguistics should consult Montclair’s Office of Graduate Admissions at www.montclair.edu/graduate/prospective

Applicants must submit a graduate application (available online) and official transcripts from all colleges and universities attended. The program advisor will use the transcripts to determine which additional courses are needed beyond the core courses.  International students must also submit an official TOEFL or IELTS score and have their transcripts evaluated by World Educational Services.

 To ensure a place in the program for September, students must apply by August 1.

 Finances

Tuition and fees for the current academic year are listed at www.montclair.edu/graduate/prospective/tuition.shtml
A small number of internships in department research and externships in local industries are available.

 Program of Study:

9 credits of core courses:

	Course No.	Course Name	Credits	Rotation	Mode
1	APLN550	Computational Linguistics	3	every fall	F2F
2	APLN553	Text Analysis Tools	3	every fall	Hybrid
3	APLN552	Current Issues in NLP	3	every spring	F2F

 

Additional courses may be required depending on the student’s background. 

For candidates with a background in linguistics, additional courses include

 

	Course No.	Course Name	Cr.	Rotation	Mode
4	CMPT505	Fundamentals of Comp Science I	4	every fall	F2F
5	MATH501	Mathematics for Comp Science	4	every spring	F2F
6	CMPT507	Fundamentals of Comp Science  II	4	every spring	F2F

 

 

 

 

Total:21 credit hours

 

For candidates with a background inComputer Science,additional courses include

 

	Course No.	Course Name	Cr.	Rotation	Mode
4	APLN500	Language and Linguistics	3	every fall	F2F
5	APLN504/APLN524	Syntax OR Advanced Structure of American English	3	every spring	F2F
6	APLN5xx	A course from the list of required APLN courses OR A Group I ALPN elective course	3	every spring	F2F

Total: 18 credit hours

 For further questions, please contact Eileen Fitzpatrick at fitzpatricke@mail.montclair.edu or Anna Feldman at feldmana@mail.montclair.edu