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The Departments of Linguistics and Computer Science have teamed up to jointly offer an interdisciplinary degree, the Computational Linguistics, Analytics, Search and Informatics Professional Master’s Degree (CLASIC), approved by the University of Colorado Board of Regents in April 2016. Professor Martha Palmer, who holds a joint appointment in the two departments, developed the program. She, Professor Susan Brown, and Professor Jim Martin (Computer Science) direct the program.
CLASIC, a stand-alone Professional Master of Science degree, provides students with a solid foundation in both linguistics and computer science graduate course work as well as several courses focused on data-driven linguistics, computational linguistics, and information processing. Graduates of the program will be specialists in the application of computers to the processing of natural languages, such as English, Chinese, Arabic and Urdu.
The field of computational linguistics, also known as text analytics, natural language processing, and informatics, is burgeoning and has become critical to the success of mainstream global businesses who compete for employees qualified to address these needs as discussed in these articles; click here and here. The interdisciplinary nature of CLASIC is a significant market strength because success in this developing field of natural language processing requires a strong background in both Linguistics and Computer Science. The training will prepare students for careers in predictive text messaging, search engines, question-answering, interactive virtual agents and machine translation.
CLASIC students complete a two-year degree including a 2-hour capstone project that runs in conjunction with an internship or CU based research project. As part of the capstone, students are evaluated by their employer or industry project manager. Students prepare a technical report on the completed project that the program directors and project leader will jointly evaluate.
Students participate fully in CLEAR lab activities and in the broader CU NLP program.