Language Technology Uppsala University

Overview

The aim of the Language Technology programme at Uppsala University is to prepare you for a career in the commercial language technology field, as well as for a future in the academic world, for instance, as a PhD student.

Applications involving language technology are more or less defining of our contemporary way of life. They include document search and filtering, automatic translation, writers' aids, business intelligence, and user profiling. The core of language technology involves methods for automatically analysing texts with a sensitivity for their linguistic structure and content.

The challenges you will find in this field lie in the richness, unpredictability, and creativity of human communication, not least in the new modes of personal expression encouraged by social media. In working with the practical side of language technology, you will also gain insights in more theoretical computational linguistics. Important themes are empirical methods and data collection, statistics in modelling of linguistic phenomena, and machine learning.

Career

Our graduates typically work at smaller companies specialising in language technology or artificial intelligence. Some of our alumni have found employment at the large companies working in these fields, such as Google and Microsoft. A number of students have had the opportunity to continue as reseachers or PhD students in universities.The language technology field is characterised by close interaction between university groups and commercial companies. This kind of competence also opens doors to related fields, e.g. where other human behavioural data are analysed by computational methods.