Computational linguistics develops formalised models and algorithms of natural language as well as implementations of these in order to process text or speech. Over the past two decades, this interdisciplinary field has developed strongly as a result of a) the enormous increase in the amount of electronically available data; b) increasing computing power; c) methods that are data-driven, thereby aiming to replace hand-written rules with models that process data automatically using statistics and/or machine learning. The area offers new possibilities to confront descriptive and theoretical linguistics with empirical evidence, while generating language technology applications such as machine translation, dialogue systems, information access and studies of the Web in real time.
The Department of Linguistics offers two full study programmes: a Bachelor’s Programme in Linguistics with a specialization in Computational Linguistics, held in Swedish and a two-year Master's Programme in Language Sciences, conducted in English. In addition, most of the courses within these programmes can be taken as free-standing courses at either level. If you are an exchange student interested in studying at the Department of Linguistics, you can find more information on our education pages
Our present research areas involve projects ranging from very small data sets (such as parent—child interaction), through medium-sized data sets (such as Strindberg's novels) to big data sets (such as Internet texts).
