MSc in Computer Science with Speech and Language Processing

Why study this course ?

The capabilities of computational speech and language processing (SLP) have grown substantially in recent years, both in the research laboratory and in the commercial marketplace. There is now a wide range of applications for SLP systems such as automatic translation between languages (e.g. Arabic and English), automatic speech recognition, automatic answering of questions, text mining (e.g. from the web) and access to information through spoken human-computer dialogue. Systems which use speech and language processing are now in everyday use, through technologies such as internet search engines and mobile phones, and most major international computer and telecoms companies now engage in SLP research and development. As a result, there is strong demand for graduates with the highly-specialised multi-disciplinary skills that are required in SLP, both as practitioners in the development of SLP applications and as researchers into the advanced capabilities required for next-generation SLP systems.

The Masters course in Speech and Language Processing has been carefully tailored to meet this training need, by providing a balanced programme of instruction across a range of relevant disciplines including speech processing, computational linguistics/natural language processing and machine learning. The course aims to give the student a solid grounding in the computational principles underlying speech and language processing as well as an understanding of a variety of current speech and language processing applications.

Research-led teaching to enhance your career

The Department of Computer Science is an internationally recognised centre for speech and language research, with particular interests in the fields of speech technology, natural language processing and dialogue systems. This programme has close links with the Speech and Hearing and Natural Language Processing groups, the two largest research groups in the Department of Computer Science, and is principally taught by staff from these groups. Students on the course have exclusive use of their own computer lab in addition to access to general facilities within the department and university.

Teaching is carried out in in a research-led environment. This means that you will study the most advanced theories and techniques in the field, and also have the opportunity to use state- of-the-art software tools. You will also have opportunities to engage in research-level activity through in-depth exploration of chosen topics and through your dissertation. A wide range of dissertation topics are offered by staff teaching the course and students are also free to develop their own project ideas. Related projects chosen by students in previous years include "Accent Morphing", "High Feature Detection in Broadcast New Video", "Voice Stress Analysis: Detection of Deception", "Improving Information Retrieval using WordSpace", "Question Answering from Large Text Collections" and "Search Optimisation using a Personalised Web Monitor".

Graduates from this course are highly valued in industry, commerce and academia. The department has good links with a number of such companies in the computational speech and language processing field, including MicroSoft, Toshiba, British Telecom, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, VoiceSignal, SoftSound, XoVox and Nuance.

The programme is also an excellent introduction to the substantial research opportunities for doctoral-level study in SLP.

You can find out more about the modules in this course on our intranet site.

Entry requirements

Applicants should normally hold at least an upper second class Honours degree, or equivalent, in a relevant discipline. This could be computer science, engineering, linguistics, psychology or mathematics, but other subjects may also be appropriate. You should also have an A level or equivalent in mathematics, and some experience of computer programming.