What are the best schools for studying natural language processing?
What are the best schools for studying natural language processing?
US universities:
University of California, Berkeley
Notable NLP faculty: Dan Klein, Marti Hearst, David Bamman
NLP research: Probably one of the best places for doing work at the intersection of NLP and Machine Learning. Dan has produced prolific students like Aria Haghighi, John DeNero and Percy Liang.
URL: Berkeley NLP Group - Members
University of California, San Diego
Notable NLP faculty: Roger Levy and Lawrence Saul, most prominently.
NLP research: Their lab is very machine learning oriented. Not a lot of NLP but some very interesting work on computational psycholinguistics.
URL: UCSD Computational Psycholinguistics Lab : Home
University of California, Santa Cruz
Notable NLP faculty: Pranav Anand, Lyn Walker, and Lise Getoor.
NLP research: Lyn Walker focuses on dialog systems.
URL: Pranav Anand :: Linguistics Department :: UCSC University of California Santa Cruz
Carnegie Mellon University
Notable NLP faculty: Jaime Carbonell, Alon Lavie, Carolyn Rosé, Lori Levin, Roni Rosenfeld, Chris Dyer (on leave), Alan Black, Tom Mitchell and Ed Hovy.
NLP Research: Another multi-faceted school. Lots of work on different NLP areas: machine translation, summarization, interactive dialog systems, speech, information retrieval and, most importantly, machine learning. Chris works at the intersection of machine learning and machine translation and does fantastic work. Though he is in the Machine Learning Department and not LTI, Tom Mitchell is worth a mention for his work with CMU's Never Ending Language Learner.
URL: NLP/CL at Carnegie Mellon, CMU - Language Technologies Institute
University of Chicago (and the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago)
Notable NLP faculty: John Lafferty, John Goldsmith, Karen Livescu, Michel Galley (part-time) and Kevin Gimpel.
NLP research: Together with TTIC, Chicago has a great set of people who work on machine learning, speech and NLP. John Lafferty is an NLP legend who was a contributor to the original IBM MT models and a co-inventor of CRFs. John Goldsmith's group is one of the forerunners on unsupervised morphology induction. Karen works on speech, particularly pronunciation modeling. Michel works on structured prediction problems, particularly statistical machine translation. Kevin works on a whole range of structured prediction problems and has published some excellent papers.
URL: machine learning @ uchicago and TTIC Faculty
Note (F12): Michel is still at Microsoft Research and is adjunct faculty at TTI, i.e., he spends a month in the summer here. Kevin Gimpel (formerly Noah Smith's student) has been hired for a 3 year non-tenure-track position.
University of Colorado Boulder
Notable NLP faculty: Jordan Boyd-Graber, Martha Palmer, James Martin, Mans Hulden, Michael Paul
NLP research: Martha Palmer works on annotation and creation of resources such as FrameNet, VerbNet, OntoNotes, etc. Some work on lexical semantics as well. Jim Martin works on vector-space models of language and wrote (along with Dan Jurafsky, formerly at Boulder before he went to Stanford) the foundational textbook on speech and language processing. Hulden, Boyd-Graber, and Paul recently joined Boulder. Hulden works on phonology and morphology (using finite-state methods), Boyd-Graber works on topic models and machine learning applications to question answering and machine translation. Michael Paul looks at applications of machine learning to social media monitoring.
URL: http://clear.colorado.edu/start/...
Columbia University
Notable NLP faculty: Several really big names; Kathy McKeown, Julia Hirschberg, Michael Collins, Owen Rambow, Dave Blei, Daniel Hsu, and Becky Passonneau.
NLP research: A lot of summarization, information extraction and machine translation research. Julia's group mostly works on speech stuff. Michael Collins recently joined this group from MIT. He works on Machine Translation and Parsing. Dave Blei and Daniel Hsu are machine learning powerhouses who occasionally work on language-related applications.
URL: NLP at Columbia University
Cornell University
Notable NLP faculty: Lillian Lee, Thorsten Joachims, Claire Cardie, John Hale, David Mimno, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, and Mats Rooth.
NLP research: Lots of very interesting work in machine learning driven NLP. Lillian does some very off-the-beaten-path research with her students like movie review classification, sentiment analysis etc. Also, one of the pioneers in vector machines (Thorsten) and the author of the most used SVM package (SVMlight) is here too. John works in computational psycholinguistics and cognitive science and Mats works in several areas including semantics and phonology. Claire Cardie's work on deception in reviews has been very influential. David Mimno is a leading researcher in the intersection between machine learning and digital humanities.
URL: Home - Cornell NLP group - Confluence
Georgia Institute of Technology
Notable NLP faculty: Jacob Eisenstein and Eric Gilbert
NLP research: Jacob does fantastic work at the intersection of machine learning and NLP, particularly unsupervised learning and recently social media / informal domains, . He was Regina Barzilay's student at MIT and did postdocs at CMU (with Noah Smith) and UIUC (with Dan Roth). In addition to Jacob, there is other interesting work going on in computational social science (Eric Gilbert). Both these areas frequently intersect with NLP.
URL: Jacob Eisenstein, Statistical Machine Learning and Visualizationandcomp.social lab
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Notable NLP faculty: Dan Roth, Julia Hockenmaier, ChengXiang Zhai, Roxana Girju and Mark Hasegawa-Johnson
NLP research: Machine Learning for NLP, BioNLP, Multilingual information retrieval, Comptuational social science, Automated speech recognition and modeling.
URL: NLP @ Illinois
Johns Hopkins University
Notable NLP faculty: Jason Eisner, Sanjeev Khudanpur, David Yarowsky, Mark Dredze, Philipp Koehn, and Ben van Durme. It's a huge list; see here: Home
NLP research: JHU has two big centers that do NLP research: the Center for Language and Speech Processing (CLSP) and the Human Language Technology Center of Excellence established by the US Govt. (CoE). They do research in almost all aspects of NLP but machine learning, machine translation, parsing and speech figure most prominently. Until recently, they also had Fred Jelinek who basically pioneered the field of automated speech recognition as it exists today. He passed away in September 2010. They have a fantastic and intensive NLP summer research workshop that has produced some of the most ground-breaking research and tools in the past decade in various NLP sub-fields.
URL: Home, the Center for Language and Speech Processing
University of Maryland, College Park
Notable NLP faculty: Philip Resnik, Hal Daume, Marine Carpuat
NLP Research: Like JHU, they work on a lot of things. Big areas are machine translation, machine learning, information retrieval and computational social science.
URL: CLIP
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Notable NLP faculty: Andrew McCallum, James Allan (note: not James Allen from Rochester), Brendan O'Connor, and W. Bruce Croft.
NLP research: One of the best places to study machine learning and information retrieval. Andrew's group has produced some of the best research in machine learning as applied to NLP, be it on sequence models such as CRFs or unsupervised topic models. She and Mark Dredze have also written a very nice guide on how to be a successful NLP/ML PhD student (http://people.cs.umass.edu/~wall...). Bruce has literally written the book on search engines (Search Engines: Information Retrieval in Practice) and James Allan is one of the founding fathers of modern, practical information retrieval. There is also extensive research in the area of information extraction at the Information Extraction and Synthesis Laboratory. Last but not least, Umass is the home of Mallet Toolkit - one of the most useful and least documented toolkits in NLP.
URL: Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval, Information Extraction and Synthesis Laboratory and MALLET homepage
Note (S14): Hanna Wallach is currently on leave at Microsoft Research.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Notable NLP faculty: Regina Barzilay and Jim Glass
NLP research: Regina does extremely interesting work on summarization, semantics, discourse analysis and, more recently, decipherment of ancient scripts in collaboration with Kevin Knight of ISI. A lot of interesting machine learning work. There is a bigger group working on speech which includes Jim Glass.
URL: Regina Barzilay, Welcome to the Spoken Language Systems Group
University of North Texas
Notable NLP faculty: Rodney Nielsen
NLP research: Rodney is a strong presence in the NLP-for-education world and has worked on automated scoring, intelligent tutoring systems.
URL: Rodney Nielsen - Home Page
Northeastern University
Notable NLP faculty: David A. Smith
NLP research: David does fascinating work in digital humanities problems with strong ties to syntax. Among other things, he's on a Google grant for syntactic analysis of books and he's been busy lately investigating structural language change.
URL: Center for Digital Humanities and Computational Social Science
City University of New York (CUNY)
Notable NLP faculty: Martin Chodorow, Matt Huenerfauth and Andrew Rosenberg.
NLP research: CUNY has recently hired some really good NLP people. Andrew works mostly on the speech side and has a really interesting set of research topics. Martin (who also consults for ETS and is a co-author of mine on several recent papers) is the same Martin Chodrow of the Leacock-Chodorow WordNet similarity metric fame. He continues to do very interesting work on corpus linguistics and psycholinguistics. The NLP@CUNY folks also organize a nice monthly seminar that's open to all NLP folks in the Greater New York area and has features very interesting speakers.
URL: Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics research at The City University of New York (CUNY)
Ohio State University
Notable NLP faculty: Eric Fosler-Lussier, Michael White, William Schuler, Micha Elsner, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Simon Dennis, and (recently) Alan Ritter.
NLP research: Eric's group is extremely versatile and works on everything from speech to language modeling to dialog systems. Michael works in natural language generation and speech synthesis. William's' group works on parsing, translation as well as cognitive science. Micha has recently joined OSU after a postdoc stint at Edinburgh and works on parsing, discourse, narrative generation as well as language acquisition. Simon works primarily on cognitive aspects of language processing.
URL: Computational Linguistics and Language Technology at OSU
University of Pennsylvania
Notable NLP faculty: Arvind Joshi, Ani Nenkova, Mitch Marcus, Mark Liberman and Chris Callison-Burch
NLP research: Lots of parsing: home of LTAG, Penn Treebank. Ani works on multi-document summarization. Lots of machine learning too. Prof. Joshi is an Association for Computational Linguistics lifetime achievement award winner.
URL: Penn Natural Language Processing
University of Pittsburgh
Notable NLP faculty: Rebecca Hwa, Diane Litman, Janyce Wiebe.
NLP research: Diane Litman does interesting work on dialog systems and evaluating student performance. Janyce Wiebe is influential in sentiment / subjectivity analysis.
URL: Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval
University of Rochester
Notable NLP faculty: Len Schubert, James Allen and Dan Gildea
NLP research: James Allen is one of the foremost researchers in the field of discourse and dialog and many of his his students have gone on to be very successful in the field (e.g., Amanda Stent at AT&T Labs and David Traum at USC/ISI). Len Schubert is a big name in the area of computational semantics and many of his students are big in NLP now (e.g., Ben Van Durme who is at Hopkins). Dan does very interesting work at the intersection of machine learning, machine translation and parsing.
URL: Page on rochester.edu, Daniel Gildea and Lenhart K. Schubert
Rutgers University
Notable NLP faculty: Nina Wacholder, Matthew Stone
NLP research: Smaranda and Nina are part of the SALTS (Laboratory for the Study of Applied Language Technology and Society) lab at the School of Communication and Information. They are not in CS. Smaranda works pretty much on NLP - machine translation, information extraction and semantics. Nina, although trained as a CL, seems to focus more on cognitive aspects nowadays. Matt Stone is CS and works on things like formal semantics and multimodal communication
URL: Welcome [SALTS Lab] and Matthew Stone
University of Southern California
Notable NLP faculty: USC has the Information Sciences Institute which houses some of the most brilliant NLP researchers around: Kevin Knight, Daniel Marcu, Jerry Hobbs, and Zornitsa Kozareva.
NLP research: They do research on almost every conceivable NLP topic. However, some of the big areas are machine translation, decipherment and information extraction. Jerry has primarily worked in the areas of discourse and dialog. Zornitsa works on relation mining and information extraction.
URL: The Natural Language Group at USC/ISI
Note (S14): David Chiang is leaving ISI to start a new group at Notre Dame in the Fall.
Stanford University
Notable NLP faculty: Daniel Jurafsky, Christopher Manning, Percy Liang, and Chris Potts.
NLP research: Jurafsky literally wrote the textbook on NLP, along with James Martin at UC Boulder. Almost every topic you can imagine. The group responsible for creating probably the most used syntactic parser and POS-tagger in the field today.
URL: The Stanford NLP (Natural Language Processing) Group
The University of Texas at Austin
Notable NLP faculty: Ray Mooney, Katrin Erk, Jason Baldridge and Matt Lease
NLP research: Ray is a very well-established senior researcher in NLP and AI. He has worked in a large number of areas including but not limited to machine learning, cognitive science, information extraction, logic. He is still very active and supervises a number of students who publish in lots of great venues. Katrin works mostly on computational semantics and is one of the well-known researchers in the field. Jason works on very cool stuff related at the intersection of semi-supervised learning and parsing and discourse. Matt works on various aspects of IR but has most recently published a lot on using crowdsourcing for IR.
URL: The UT Austin Computational Linguistics Lab
University of Washington
Notable NLP faculty: Mari Ostendorf, Jeff Bilmes, Katrin Kirchoff, Luke Zettlemoyer, Gina Ann Levow, Emily Bender, Noah Smith (joining in 2015), and Fei Xia.
NLP research: The research is generally skewed towards speech and parsing but they also do general machine learning and they have recently started working on machine translation. Fei works on a large number of areas ranging from MT to parsing to language to bio-NLP. Emily does very interesting work at the intersection of linguistics and NLP and runs the well-known Professional MS in Computational Linguistics program. Gina works in dialog, speech and information retrieval.
URL: SSLI Lab: Home, Turing Center at University of Washington andDept. of Linguistics - University of Washington
Note (F13): Oren Etzioni recently moved from UW to The Allen Institute for AI. Ben Taskar, who did interesting work in structured prediction and in particular machine translation, recently passed away.
University of Wisconsin - Madison
Notable NLP faculty: Jerry Zhu.
NLP research: Jerry is more of an ML guy and works mainly on semi-supervised learning. However, more recently he has also published on social media analysis.
URL: Xiaojin Zhu
Non-US universities:
University of Cambridge
Notable NLP faculty: Stephen Clark, Simone Teufel and Bil Byrne.
NLP Research: A lot of parsing and IR based stuff but in recent years they have also published on other things. Bill is a very well-known figure in speech and machine translation research.
URL: Computer Laboratory
University of Edinburgh
Notable NLP faculty: Mirella Lapata, Mark Steedman, Miles Osborne, Steve Renals, Bonnie Webber, Ewan Klein, Charles Sutton, Shay Cohen.
NLP research: they do almost everything but the work I am most familiar with is on statistical machine translation and machine learning based approaches to discourse coherence.
URL: Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation
HKUST
Notable NLP faculty: Dekai Wu and Pascale Fung
NLP Research: Dekai is one of the most well-known statistical MT researchers around. His earlier work on bracketing grammars and word alignment is well-known and has inspired recent work in MT. Most recently, he and his students have been working on integrating semantics into statistical MT: both into the actual translation model as well as into the automated metrics used to evaluate translation quality. Pascale pioneered the work on extracting bilingual lexicons from non-parallel corpora and, more generally, using comparable corpora for statistical MT. Most recently, she has been working on speech, specifically, speech summarization. As with most Chinese universities, special emphasis is placed on Chinese NLP.
URL: HKUST Human Language Technology Center
National University of Singapore
Notable NLP faculty: Hwee Tou Ng
NLP Research: Hwee Tou's group works primarily on machine translation (with a big focus on automatic evaluation of translation quality) and grammatical error correction. They also publish a bit on word sense disambiguation and natural language generation. Preslav Nakov used to be here as a postdoc but has recently moved to Qatar.
URL: Page on nus.edu.sg
University of Oxford
Notable NLP faculty: Stephen Pulman, Phil Blunsom
NLP Research: Stephen works a lot on second language learning kind of things and pragmatics. Phil is probably one of the leading folks working at the intersection of machine learning and machine translation.
URL: Oxford Computational Linguistics Group
RWTH Aachen University
Notable NLP faculty: Hermann Ney
NLP Research: Aachen is one of the top places in the world to study speech recognition and machine translation. There are, at any point, at lead 10-15 PhD students working under Hermann Ney. Some of the best minds in statistical MT have come from Aachen (Franz Och, head of Google Translate), Richard Zens (now at Google) and Nicola Ueffing (now at NRC, Canada). In addition to the usual speech and MT research, they are also doing some very interesting research on translating and recognizing sign language. Not a lot of research in other NLP areas though.
URL: zentral: Language Processing and Pattern Recognition
University of Sheffield
Notable NLP faculty: Trevor Cohn, Lucia Specia, Mark Stevenson and Yorick Wilks
NLP Research: Trevor works at the intersection of machine learning and NLP particularly in the area of graphical models and Bayesian inference. Lucia is well known figure in MT research and has organized (or co-organized) several shared tasks and workshops in the area. Mark's group works in the areas of computational semantics and information extraction and retrieval. Yorick is an ACL lifetime achievement award winner and has worked in a large number of areas over the years. Most recently, his work has been in the areas of pragmatics and information extraction.
URL: NLP
The Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing Lab, Technische Universität Darmstadt
Notable NLP faculty: Irena Gurevych, Chris Biemann and Torsten Zesch
NLP Research: A whole lot going on here: computational lexical semantics, leveraging and understanding wikipedias and wikis in general, sentiment analysis, educational NLP, digital humanities. Irena is a well-known name in CL and NLP. Chris used to be at Powerset and works on very interesting projects in semantics. Torsten has a lot of students working in a lot of different areas. UKP releases a lot of very useful software to the community; one of the most useful being the JWPL (Java Wikipedia Library).
URL: UKP Home
University of Toronto
Notable NLP faculty: Graeme Hirst, Gerald Penn and Suzanne Stevenson.
NLP Research: A lot of work on lexical semantics and a bit on parsing. Gerald works on speech.
URL: Computational Linguistics
University College London
Notable NLP faculty: Sebastian Riedel
NLP Research: Sebastian's work is primarily concerned with natural language understanding, mostly knowledge bases and semantics.
URL: UCL Machine Reading
University of California, Berkeley
Notable NLP faculty: Dan Klein, Marti Hearst, David Bamman
NLP research: Probably one of the best places for doing work at the intersection of NLP and Machine Learning. Dan has produced prolific students like Aria Haghighi, John DeNero and Percy Liang.
URL: Berkeley NLP Group - Members
University of California, San Diego
Notable NLP faculty: Roger Levy and Lawrence Saul, most prominently.
NLP research: Their lab is very machine learning oriented. Not a lot of NLP but some very interesting work on computational psycholinguistics.
URL: UCSD Computational Psycholinguistics Lab : Home
University of California, Santa Cruz
Notable NLP faculty: Pranav Anand, Lyn Walker, and Lise Getoor.
NLP research: Lyn Walker focuses on dialog systems.
URL: Pranav Anand :: Linguistics Department :: UCSC University of California Santa Cruz
Carnegie Mellon University
Notable NLP faculty: Jaime Carbonell, Alon Lavie, Carolyn Rosé, Lori Levin, Roni Rosenfeld, Chris Dyer (on leave), Alan Black, Tom Mitchell and Ed Hovy.
NLP Research: Another multi-faceted school. Lots of work on different NLP areas: machine translation, summarization, interactive dialog systems, speech, information retrieval and, most importantly, machine learning. Chris works at the intersection of machine learning and machine translation and does fantastic work. Though he is in the Machine Learning Department and not LTI, Tom Mitchell is worth a mention for his work with CMU's Never Ending Language Learner.
URL: NLP/CL at Carnegie Mellon, CMU - Language Technologies Institute
University of Chicago (and the Toyota Technological Institute at Chicago)
Notable NLP faculty: John Lafferty, John Goldsmith, Karen Livescu, Michel Galley (part-time) and Kevin Gimpel.
NLP research: Together with TTIC, Chicago has a great set of people who work on machine learning, speech and NLP. John Lafferty is an NLP legend who was a contributor to the original IBM MT models and a co-inventor of CRFs. John Goldsmith's group is one of the forerunners on unsupervised morphology induction. Karen works on speech, particularly pronunciation modeling. Michel works on structured prediction problems, particularly statistical machine translation. Kevin works on a whole range of structured prediction problems and has published some excellent papers.
URL: machine learning @ uchicago and TTIC Faculty
Note (F12): Michel is still at Microsoft Research and is adjunct faculty at TTI, i.e., he spends a month in the summer here. Kevin Gimpel (formerly Noah Smith's student) has been hired for a 3 year non-tenure-track position.
University of Colorado Boulder
Notable NLP faculty: Jordan Boyd-Graber, Martha Palmer, James Martin, Mans Hulden, Michael Paul
NLP research: Martha Palmer works on annotation and creation of resources such as FrameNet, VerbNet, OntoNotes, etc. Some work on lexical semantics as well. Jim Martin works on vector-space models of language and wrote (along with Dan Jurafsky, formerly at Boulder before he went to Stanford) the foundational textbook on speech and language processing. Hulden, Boyd-Graber, and Paul recently joined Boulder. Hulden works on phonology and morphology (using finite-state methods), Boyd-Graber works on topic models and machine learning applications to question answering and machine translation. Michael Paul looks at applications of machine learning to social media monitoring.
URL: http://clear.colorado.edu/start/...
Columbia University
Notable NLP faculty: Several really big names; Kathy McKeown, Julia Hirschberg, Michael Collins, Owen Rambow, Dave Blei, Daniel Hsu, and Becky Passonneau.
NLP research: A lot of summarization, information extraction and machine translation research. Julia's group mostly works on speech stuff. Michael Collins recently joined this group from MIT. He works on Machine Translation and Parsing. Dave Blei and Daniel Hsu are machine learning powerhouses who occasionally work on language-related applications.
URL: NLP at Columbia University
Cornell University
Notable NLP faculty: Lillian Lee, Thorsten Joachims, Claire Cardie, John Hale, David Mimno, Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, and Mats Rooth.
NLP research: Lots of very interesting work in machine learning driven NLP. Lillian does some very off-the-beaten-path research with her students like movie review classification, sentiment analysis etc. Also, one of the pioneers in vector machines (Thorsten) and the author of the most used SVM package (SVMlight) is here too. John works in computational psycholinguistics and cognitive science and Mats works in several areas including semantics and phonology. Claire Cardie's work on deception in reviews has been very influential. David Mimno is a leading researcher in the intersection between machine learning and digital humanities.
URL: Home - Cornell NLP group - Confluence
Georgia Institute of Technology
Notable NLP faculty: Jacob Eisenstein and Eric Gilbert
NLP research: Jacob does fantastic work at the intersection of machine learning and NLP, particularly unsupervised learning and recently social media / informal domains, . He was Regina Barzilay's student at MIT and did postdocs at CMU (with Noah Smith) and UIUC (with Dan Roth). In addition to Jacob, there is other interesting work going on in computational social science (Eric Gilbert). Both these areas frequently intersect with NLP.
URL: Jacob Eisenstein, Statistical Machine Learning and Visualizationandcomp.social lab
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Notable NLP faculty: Dan Roth, Julia Hockenmaier, ChengXiang Zhai, Roxana Girju and Mark Hasegawa-Johnson
NLP research: Machine Learning for NLP, BioNLP, Multilingual information retrieval, Comptuational social science, Automated speech recognition and modeling.
URL: NLP @ Illinois
Johns Hopkins University
Notable NLP faculty: Jason Eisner, Sanjeev Khudanpur, David Yarowsky, Mark Dredze, Philipp Koehn, and Ben van Durme. It's a huge list; see here: Home
NLP research: JHU has two big centers that do NLP research: the Center for Language and Speech Processing (CLSP) and the Human Language Technology Center of Excellence established by the US Govt. (CoE). They do research in almost all aspects of NLP but machine learning, machine translation, parsing and speech figure most prominently. Until recently, they also had Fred Jelinek who basically pioneered the field of automated speech recognition as it exists today. He passed away in September 2010. They have a fantastic and intensive NLP summer research workshop that has produced some of the most ground-breaking research and tools in the past decade in various NLP sub-fields.
URL: Home, the Center for Language and Speech Processing
University of Maryland, College Park
Notable NLP faculty: Philip Resnik, Hal Daume, Marine Carpuat
NLP Research: Like JHU, they work on a lot of things. Big areas are machine translation, machine learning, information retrieval and computational social science.
URL: CLIP
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Notable NLP faculty: Andrew McCallum, James Allan (note: not James Allen from Rochester), Brendan O'Connor, and W. Bruce Croft.
NLP research: One of the best places to study machine learning and information retrieval. Andrew's group has produced some of the best research in machine learning as applied to NLP, be it on sequence models such as CRFs or unsupervised topic models. She and Mark Dredze have also written a very nice guide on how to be a successful NLP/ML PhD student (http://people.cs.umass.edu/~wall...). Bruce has literally written the book on search engines (Search Engines: Information Retrieval in Practice) and James Allan is one of the founding fathers of modern, practical information retrieval. There is also extensive research in the area of information extraction at the Information Extraction and Synthesis Laboratory. Last but not least, Umass is the home of Mallet Toolkit - one of the most useful and least documented toolkits in NLP.
URL: Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval, Information Extraction and Synthesis Laboratory and MALLET homepage
Note (S14): Hanna Wallach is currently on leave at Microsoft Research.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Notable NLP faculty: Regina Barzilay and Jim Glass
NLP research: Regina does extremely interesting work on summarization, semantics, discourse analysis and, more recently, decipherment of ancient scripts in collaboration with Kevin Knight of ISI. A lot of interesting machine learning work. There is a bigger group working on speech which includes Jim Glass.
URL: Regina Barzilay, Welcome to the Spoken Language Systems Group
University of North Texas
Notable NLP faculty: Rodney Nielsen
NLP research: Rodney is a strong presence in the NLP-for-education world and has worked on automated scoring, intelligent tutoring systems.
URL: Rodney Nielsen - Home Page
Northeastern University
Notable NLP faculty: David A. Smith
NLP research: David does fascinating work in digital humanities problems with strong ties to syntax. Among other things, he's on a Google grant for syntactic analysis of books and he's been busy lately investigating structural language change.
URL: Center for Digital Humanities and Computational Social Science
City University of New York (CUNY)
Notable NLP faculty: Martin Chodorow, Matt Huenerfauth and Andrew Rosenberg.
NLP research: CUNY has recently hired some really good NLP people. Andrew works mostly on the speech side and has a really interesting set of research topics. Martin (who also consults for ETS and is a co-author of mine on several recent papers) is the same Martin Chodrow of the Leacock-Chodorow WordNet similarity metric fame. He continues to do very interesting work on corpus linguistics and psycholinguistics. The NLP@CUNY folks also organize a nice monthly seminar that's open to all NLP folks in the Greater New York area and has features very interesting speakers.
URL: Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics research at The City University of New York (CUNY)
Ohio State University
Notable NLP faculty: Eric Fosler-Lussier, Michael White, William Schuler, Micha Elsner, Marie-Catherine de Marneffe, Simon Dennis, and (recently) Alan Ritter.
NLP research: Eric's group is extremely versatile and works on everything from speech to language modeling to dialog systems. Michael works in natural language generation and speech synthesis. William's' group works on parsing, translation as well as cognitive science. Micha has recently joined OSU after a postdoc stint at Edinburgh and works on parsing, discourse, narrative generation as well as language acquisition. Simon works primarily on cognitive aspects of language processing.
URL: Computational Linguistics and Language Technology at OSU
University of Pennsylvania
Notable NLP faculty: Arvind Joshi, Ani Nenkova, Mitch Marcus, Mark Liberman and Chris Callison-Burch
NLP research: Lots of parsing: home of LTAG, Penn Treebank. Ani works on multi-document summarization. Lots of machine learning too. Prof. Joshi is an Association for Computational Linguistics lifetime achievement award winner.
URL: Penn Natural Language Processing
University of Pittsburgh
Notable NLP faculty: Rebecca Hwa, Diane Litman, Janyce Wiebe.
NLP research: Diane Litman does interesting work on dialog systems and evaluating student performance. Janyce Wiebe is influential in sentiment / subjectivity analysis.
URL: Natural Language Processing and Information Retrieval
University of Rochester
Notable NLP faculty: Len Schubert, James Allen and Dan Gildea
NLP research: James Allen is one of the foremost researchers in the field of discourse and dialog and many of his his students have gone on to be very successful in the field (e.g., Amanda Stent at AT&T Labs and David Traum at USC/ISI). Len Schubert is a big name in the area of computational semantics and many of his students are big in NLP now (e.g., Ben Van Durme who is at Hopkins). Dan does very interesting work at the intersection of machine learning, machine translation and parsing.
URL: Page on rochester.edu, Daniel Gildea and Lenhart K. Schubert
Rutgers University
Notable NLP faculty: Nina Wacholder, Matthew Stone
NLP research: Smaranda and Nina are part of the SALTS (Laboratory for the Study of Applied Language Technology and Society) lab at the School of Communication and Information. They are not in CS. Smaranda works pretty much on NLP - machine translation, information extraction and semantics. Nina, although trained as a CL, seems to focus more on cognitive aspects nowadays. Matt Stone is CS and works on things like formal semantics and multimodal communication
URL: Welcome [SALTS Lab] and Matthew Stone
University of Southern California
Notable NLP faculty: USC has the Information Sciences Institute which houses some of the most brilliant NLP researchers around: Kevin Knight, Daniel Marcu, Jerry Hobbs, and Zornitsa Kozareva.
NLP research: They do research on almost every conceivable NLP topic. However, some of the big areas are machine translation, decipherment and information extraction. Jerry has primarily worked in the areas of discourse and dialog. Zornitsa works on relation mining and information extraction.
URL: The Natural Language Group at USC/ISI
Note (S14): David Chiang is leaving ISI to start a new group at Notre Dame in the Fall.
Stanford University
Notable NLP faculty: Daniel Jurafsky, Christopher Manning, Percy Liang, and Chris Potts.
NLP research: Jurafsky literally wrote the textbook on NLP, along with James Martin at UC Boulder. Almost every topic you can imagine. The group responsible for creating probably the most used syntactic parser and POS-tagger in the field today.
URL: The Stanford NLP (Natural Language Processing) Group
The University of Texas at Austin
Notable NLP faculty: Ray Mooney, Katrin Erk, Jason Baldridge and Matt Lease
NLP research: Ray is a very well-established senior researcher in NLP and AI. He has worked in a large number of areas including but not limited to machine learning, cognitive science, information extraction, logic. He is still very active and supervises a number of students who publish in lots of great venues. Katrin works mostly on computational semantics and is one of the well-known researchers in the field. Jason works on very cool stuff related at the intersection of semi-supervised learning and parsing and discourse. Matt works on various aspects of IR but has most recently published a lot on using crowdsourcing for IR.
URL: The UT Austin Computational Linguistics Lab
University of Washington
Notable NLP faculty: Mari Ostendorf, Jeff Bilmes, Katrin Kirchoff, Luke Zettlemoyer, Gina Ann Levow, Emily Bender, Noah Smith (joining in 2015), and Fei Xia.
NLP research: The research is generally skewed towards speech and parsing but they also do general machine learning and they have recently started working on machine translation. Fei works on a large number of areas ranging from MT to parsing to language to bio-NLP. Emily does very interesting work at the intersection of linguistics and NLP and runs the well-known Professional MS in Computational Linguistics program. Gina works in dialog, speech and information retrieval.
URL: SSLI Lab: Home, Turing Center at University of Washington andDept. of Linguistics - University of Washington
Note (F13): Oren Etzioni recently moved from UW to The Allen Institute for AI. Ben Taskar, who did interesting work in structured prediction and in particular machine translation, recently passed away.
University of Wisconsin - Madison
Notable NLP faculty: Jerry Zhu.
NLP research: Jerry is more of an ML guy and works mainly on semi-supervised learning. However, more recently he has also published on social media analysis.
URL: Xiaojin Zhu
Non-US universities:
University of Cambridge
Notable NLP faculty: Stephen Clark, Simone Teufel and Bil Byrne.
NLP Research: A lot of parsing and IR based stuff but in recent years they have also published on other things. Bill is a very well-known figure in speech and machine translation research.
URL: Computer Laboratory
University of Edinburgh
Notable NLP faculty: Mirella Lapata, Mark Steedman, Miles Osborne, Steve Renals, Bonnie Webber, Ewan Klein, Charles Sutton, Shay Cohen.
NLP research: they do almost everything but the work I am most familiar with is on statistical machine translation and machine learning based approaches to discourse coherence.
URL: Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation
HKUST
Notable NLP faculty: Dekai Wu and Pascale Fung
NLP Research: Dekai is one of the most well-known statistical MT researchers around. His earlier work on bracketing grammars and word alignment is well-known and has inspired recent work in MT. Most recently, he and his students have been working on integrating semantics into statistical MT: both into the actual translation model as well as into the automated metrics used to evaluate translation quality. Pascale pioneered the work on extracting bilingual lexicons from non-parallel corpora and, more generally, using comparable corpora for statistical MT. Most recently, she has been working on speech, specifically, speech summarization. As with most Chinese universities, special emphasis is placed on Chinese NLP.
URL: HKUST Human Language Technology Center
National University of Singapore
Notable NLP faculty: Hwee Tou Ng
NLP Research: Hwee Tou's group works primarily on machine translation (with a big focus on automatic evaluation of translation quality) and grammatical error correction. They also publish a bit on word sense disambiguation and natural language generation. Preslav Nakov used to be here as a postdoc but has recently moved to Qatar.
URL: Page on nus.edu.sg
University of Oxford
Notable NLP faculty: Stephen Pulman, Phil Blunsom
NLP Research: Stephen works a lot on second language learning kind of things and pragmatics. Phil is probably one of the leading folks working at the intersection of machine learning and machine translation.
URL: Oxford Computational Linguistics Group
RWTH Aachen University
Notable NLP faculty: Hermann Ney
NLP Research: Aachen is one of the top places in the world to study speech recognition and machine translation. There are, at any point, at lead 10-15 PhD students working under Hermann Ney. Some of the best minds in statistical MT have come from Aachen (Franz Och, head of Google Translate), Richard Zens (now at Google) and Nicola Ueffing (now at NRC, Canada). In addition to the usual speech and MT research, they are also doing some very interesting research on translating and recognizing sign language. Not a lot of research in other NLP areas though.
URL: zentral: Language Processing and Pattern Recognition
University of Sheffield
Notable NLP faculty: Trevor Cohn, Lucia Specia, Mark Stevenson and Yorick Wilks
NLP Research: Trevor works at the intersection of machine learning and NLP particularly in the area of graphical models and Bayesian inference. Lucia is well known figure in MT research and has organized (or co-organized) several shared tasks and workshops in the area. Mark's group works in the areas of computational semantics and information extraction and retrieval. Yorick is an ACL lifetime achievement award winner and has worked in a large number of areas over the years. Most recently, his work has been in the areas of pragmatics and information extraction.
URL: NLP
The Ubiquitous Knowledge Processing Lab, Technische Universität Darmstadt
Notable NLP faculty: Irena Gurevych, Chris Biemann and Torsten Zesch
NLP Research: A whole lot going on here: computational lexical semantics, leveraging and understanding wikipedias and wikis in general, sentiment analysis, educational NLP, digital humanities. Irena is a well-known name in CL and NLP. Chris used to be at Powerset and works on very interesting projects in semantics. Torsten has a lot of students working in a lot of different areas. UKP releases a lot of very useful software to the community; one of the most useful being the JWPL (Java Wikipedia Library).
URL: UKP Home
University of Toronto
Notable NLP faculty: Graeme Hirst, Gerald Penn and Suzanne Stevenson.
NLP Research: A lot of work on lexical semantics and a bit on parsing. Gerald works on speech.
URL: Computational Linguistics
University College London
Notable NLP faculty: Sebastian Riedel
NLP Research: Sebastian's work is primarily concerned with natural language understanding, mostly knowledge bases and semantics.
URL: UCL Machine Reading
14 Answers
Penn has an extremely strong NLP group. Among our distinguished NLP faculty are:
Two famous, senior researchers:
Mitch Marcus - Penn Computer Science: Mitch has a long list of well cited work (Page on google.com) and is perhaps best known for constructing the Penn Treebank, an extremely widely used resource in the NLP world
Aravind Joshi: (Now emeritus, but still comes into the department) One of the pioneers of NLP, and among the most decorated NLP researchers in the world.
And two young superstars:
Ani Nenkova
Chris Callison-Burch
But I think the most impressive thing about Penn NLP is our list of alumni, who have gone on to populate the other top NLP schools. A small sample includes:
Kathy McKeown -- Henry and Gertrude Rothschild Professor of Computer Science at Columbia (former chair of the department, current director for the institute of data science)
Julia Hirschberg -- Percy K. and Vida L. W. Hudson Pofessor of Computer Science at Columbia (current chair of the department)
Michael Collins-- Formerly at MIT, now Vikram S. Pandit Professor of Computer Science at Columbia
David Yarowsky -- Full Professor at Johns Hopkins
Eric Brill -- Formerly of Johns Hopkins, now VP of research at Ebay
Philip Resnik's -- Director of the University of Maryland's computational linguistics program
Michel DeGraff -- Full professor of Linguistics at MIT
Nick Montfort-- Associate professor at MIT
Jason Eisner -- Full professor at Johns Hopkins
And plenty more -- see Penn Natural Language Processing alumni for a more complete list.
Its hard to find a more distinguished group of Alumni anywhere.
Two famous, senior researchers:
Mitch Marcus - Penn Computer Science: Mitch has a long list of well cited work (Page on google.com) and is perhaps best known for constructing the Penn Treebank, an extremely widely used resource in the NLP world
Aravind Joshi: (Now emeritus, but still comes into the department) One of the pioneers of NLP, and among the most decorated NLP researchers in the world.
And two young superstars:
Ani Nenkova
Chris Callison-Burch
But I think the most impressive thing about Penn NLP is our list of alumni, who have gone on to populate the other top NLP schools. A small sample includes:
Kathy McKeown -- Henry and Gertrude Rothschild Professor of Computer Science at Columbia (former chair of the department, current director for the institute of data science)
Julia Hirschberg -- Percy K. and Vida L. W. Hudson Pofessor of Computer Science at Columbia (current chair of the department)
Michael Collins-- Formerly at MIT, now Vikram S. Pandit Professor of Computer Science at Columbia
David Yarowsky -- Full Professor at Johns Hopkins
Eric Brill -- Formerly of Johns Hopkins, now VP of research at Ebay
Philip Resnik's -- Director of the University of Maryland's computational linguistics program
Michel DeGraff -- Full professor of Linguistics at MIT
Nick Montfort-- Associate professor at MIT
Jason Eisner -- Full professor at Johns Hopkins
And plenty more -- see Penn Natural Language Processing alumni for a more complete list.
Its hard to find a more distinguished group of Alumni anywhere.
According to Google Scholar metrics 2014, some of the top journals/conferences in Computational Linguistics/Natural Language Processing are:
While making individual effort for selecting the right graduate school in NLP, I did a small experiment:
I extracted all publication links from Google Scholar categorized under these top journals/conferences which pointed to an ACM Digital Library link, then scanned the publication summary to retrieve the authors and their universities. Here's the rundown:
There were 222 different publications and the contributing authors hailed from ~150 different universities worldwide.
Total contributor count for an university is the total number of authors (including repitition) from a particular university whose name turned up in at least one of the publications.
Total publication count for an university is the total number of publications that had an author from that university.
The universities mentioned comprised ~64% of all publications. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and IBM had a major contribution as well but I excluded them from this list.
Important note: The experiment includes only articles having citation count >= the h5-index of the particular journal in which it was published according to Google Scholar.
- Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
- Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
- North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
- International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING)
- Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL)
While making individual effort for selecting the right graduate school in NLP, I did a small experiment:
I extracted all publication links from Google Scholar categorized under these top journals/conferences which pointed to an ACM Digital Library link, then scanned the publication summary to retrieve the authors and their universities. Here's the rundown:
There were 222 different publications and the contributing authors hailed from ~150 different universities worldwide.
Total contributor count for an university is the total number of authors (including repitition) from a particular university whose name turned up in at least one of the publications.
Total publication count for an university is the total number of publications that had an author from that university.
The universities mentioned comprised ~64% of all publications. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and IBM had a major contribution as well but I excluded them from this list.
Important note: The experiment includes only articles having citation count >= the h5-index of the particular journal in which it was published according to Google Scholar.
You can see the list of best schools for studying Natural Language Processing from Naomi's answer. I think there is one thing to be noted. That is the location of the university. If I were you, I will prefer that the university I attend is in the state of California, Washington, New York. Because when you graduate, you need to find a job. There are more opportunities in those states than other states. For example, University of Colorado has a strong research group in NLP, while CUNY also has a strong group in NLP. But both universities are not highly rated as Stanford, Berkeley, JHU. IMHP, I will prefer CUNY, because there are more job opportunities there.
Appreciate any critic or idea. Thanks
Appreciate any critic or idea. Thanks
Columbia University!
NLP is one of the most active research areas here in the CS department. We have some really renowned people like Michael Collins, Kathy McKeown, Owen Rambow, Julia Hirschberg, Nizar Habash, Mona Diab and Becky Passonneau.
Consequently there are a lot of projects that you could possibly get the opportunity to work on, under one of the aforementioned.
The funding scene for NLP projects seems pretty decent too.
NLP is one of the most active research areas here in the CS department. We have some really renowned people like Michael Collins, Kathy McKeown, Owen Rambow, Julia Hirschberg, Nizar Habash, Mona Diab and Becky Passonneau.
Consequently there are a lot of projects that you could possibly get the opportunity to work on, under one of the aforementioned.
The funding scene for NLP projects seems pretty decent too.
I couldn't figure out how to edit but here's a link relevant for UMass:
Computation+Language at UMass and the Five Colleges
Also for Berkeley you might want to add David Bamman
Computation+Language at UMass and the Five Colleges
Also for Berkeley you might want to add David Bamman
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
I guess three more NLP researchers may be added in forementioned list,
1. Lane Schwartz: Lane's Research , mainly focusing on machine translation.
2. Jennifer Cole | Illinois , she is a phonetician, mostly work on speech prosody
3. Suma Bhat : NLP and Speech in Eduation
I guess three more NLP researchers may be added in forementioned list,
1. Lane Schwartz: Lane's Research , mainly focusing on machine translation.
2. Jennifer Cole | Illinois , she is a phonetician, mostly work on speech prosody
3. Suma Bhat : NLP and Speech in Eduation
What are the best schools for studying natural language processing?
There are some answers already there. :)
There are some answers already there. :)
32. University of Texas at Dallas
- NLP impact factor: very high
- Notable NLP faculty: Sanda Harabagiu, Dan Moldovan, Yang Liu, Vincent Ng
- NLP Research: many interesting projects. Well known for research in Question Answering, information extraction, coreference resolution, semantic parsing, summarization. Recent interesting work Clinical NLP.
- URL: http://www.hlt.utdallas.edu
What about University of Scheffield "Gate" GATE.ac.uk - index.html
Stanford NLP Group The Stanford NLP (Natural Language Processing) Group
Stanford NLP Group The Stanford NLP (Natural Language Processing) Group
656 Views
It sure as hell isn't the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, I promise you that. I am taking Automata right now using the textbook 'Languages and Machines'. On the first exam, which covered was over the material from chapters 1-3, 8 questions, which 40 percent or effectively 8 points of the total course grade came from chapters 5-7.
An exam that was administered yesterday, which covered the material in chapters 4-6, had 5 questions, one of those was in direct reference to the Chomsky Hierarchy, which is the only topic of Chapter 10! The first 3 sections of chapter 10, discuss the 3 of the 4 types that weren't discussed in chapter 4. That one question was effectively 20% of the the exam, which counted 4 points out the 100 for the course grade.
I guarantee you this, you should take the course from a professor who is straight forward. If the professor states in an email to the class, that the exam, should from chapters 1-3 or 4-6, every FUCKING QUESTION should come from there.
Thats not effective teaching. On the first exam I believe everyone who made an 80 or higher committed an act of cheating to do so! I personally failed the first exam miserably, and yes I am upset about that, but that is not the reason why I state this to you. You as the student, should be responsible for the grasp of the knowledge that your professor tells you should be responsible for, and to display the knowledge during an examination. You should have to question yourself (your knowledge) to an extent, that is fundamental to advancing your knowledge in a topic. In a pressure situation, you should not have your academic career riding on whether or not your professor is deceitful.
An exam that was administered yesterday, which covered the material in chapters 4-6, had 5 questions, one of those was in direct reference to the Chomsky Hierarchy, which is the only topic of Chapter 10! The first 3 sections of chapter 10, discuss the 3 of the 4 types that weren't discussed in chapter 4. That one question was effectively 20% of the the exam, which counted 4 points out the 100 for the course grade.
I guarantee you this, you should take the course from a professor who is straight forward. If the professor states in an email to the class, that the exam, should from chapters 1-3 or 4-6, every FUCKING QUESTION should come from there.
Thats not effective teaching. On the first exam I believe everyone who made an 80 or higher committed an act of cheating to do so! I personally failed the first exam miserably, and yes I am upset about that, but that is not the reason why I state this to you. You as the student, should be responsible for the grasp of the knowledge that your professor tells you should be responsible for, and to display the knowledge during an examination. You should have to question yourself (your knowledge) to an extent, that is fundamental to advancing your knowledge in a topic. In a pressure situation, you should not have your academic career riding on whether or not your professor is deceitful.
