What happens on the course?

MA Computational Linguistics, when studied full-time, comprises of three semesters worth 60 credits each. Three modules will be studied in both Semester One and Semester Two. During the third semester, students will undertake their research project and complete a 15,000 word dissertation on any aspect of Computational Linguistics.

The course covers all aspects of Computational Linguistics in-line with current and leading work in research and industry, and is divided into the following taught modules:

  1. Computer programming in Python: The students will be taught the Python computer programming language, which is very appropriate for dealing with natural language texts.
  1. Corpus Linguistics in R: Corpus Linguistics involves storing large amounts of text on the computer for linguistic analysis. R is a programming language used to study the statistics of language.
  1. Machine translation and other natural language processing applications: The automatic translation of text using statistics. The members of the Research Group will each speak on their own research areas throughout the module.
  1. Computational Linguistics: The use of computers to study language at all levels, such as relations between words, part of speech tagging, syntactic parsing and anaphora resolution.
  1. Translation tools for professional translators: Using computer tools to speed up many aspects of translation, such as product manuals, film scripts, medical texts, video games and simultaneous interpreting.
  1. Machine learning for language processing: Computer techniques for automatically classifying natural language texts, for NLP tasks such as making summaries of text automatically.
  1. Research methods and professional skills: You will learn how to design an experiment to thoroughly test your research questions.

Translation Tools for Professional Translators is an elective module that may be chosen in the Second Semester to replace another taught module for those students who are interested in pursuing careers in Translation.

You will be expected to dedicate 9 hours per week to lectures and a proportionate amount of time to self-study and tutorials with your supervisor.


  • You will be taught by leading researchers in the field: our teaching staff at the Research Institute of Information and Language Processing (RIILP) are engaged in high-quality research, as evidenced by the latest RAE 2008 and REF 2014 results.
  • We offer an exciting programme of invited lectures and research seminars, attended by both students and staff;

The institute has a wide network of contacts in academia and in the industry from which you will be able to benefit.