Language Technology in Business and Education

The programme is designed for graduates of bachelor programs in philology (with a major in linguistics) and computer science. However, it is also open to those who had undergraduate in other humanities and social sciences: history, sociology, anthropology, journalism - provided that students have an interest in linguistics and computer science.

The programme prepares specialists with two complementary competencies: basic linguistic knowledge and advanced skills in the field of automatic analysis of natural language. The programme is focused on practical training in the field of language technology at two tracks.

• Track: "Language technologies in business": graduates of this track will become specialists in the field of processing and analysis of text data.
• Track: "Language technologies in education": graduates of this track will become specialists in the field of language technologies in teaching and testing.

• The uniqueness of the program;

Today both in Russia and in the world there is a lack of specialists who can equally understand how the language works and how the computer presentation of information works. We train professionals who not only have theoretical knowledge, but understand how to use their skills for specific tasks in which the language or languages are the central focus. The program is built on the integration of knowledge and skills from two areas: linguistics and computer science.

• Getting practical skills;

The programme prepares graduates who are able to use their knowledge to perform specific tasks in which language is the central object of computer analysis. An essential part of the programme is practical activity, both within the framework of project group work and in the format of working practice. These features of the programme not only prepare the graduate for work, but also create conditions for the integration of training and workflow.

• Internship in well-known companies.

The University cooperates with companies and institutions such as Yandex, Sberbank, Helsinki and Berlin Universities, and the Mariinsky Theater.

The two-years program offers both general courses and practical training with focusing on the latter.

Freshman courses are taught at the beginning of study and offer an Introduction to Linguistics and Fundamentals of Information Technology. Two other courses, Functional Models in Linguistics and Formal Models in Linguistics constitute a compulsory part of the program. The goal of these courses is to align the knowledge of students who entered the program after different BA programs.

The basic part includes general courses that are required by all students regardless of their further studying track. The courses shape basics in NLP and train programming skills, which constitute a foundation of an NLP expert. They introduce main areas in NLP (Introduction in NLP, Mathematics for linguistics, Analysis and visualization of textual data) and train practical skills in Python and relational databases.

Elective courses start at the second year and form two educational tracks: industrial NLP and NLP in EdTech. The tracks provide students with in-depth knowledge and state-of-the-art skills along student’s individual learning path.

• The industrial NLP track teaches students to develop application or to conduct data science analysis. On this track, the students choose courses that allow for mastering in big data analysis, ontologies and semantic networks, content analysis and topic modeling, deep learning technologies, information retrieval, speech technologies.
• The EduTech track provides students with methods of teaching online, develops practical skills in creating MOOCs and CALL environment. The courses offered on this track are: Corpus linguistics at class, Language assessment, Applied linguistics, and Cultural analytics.

The curriculum also includes one group project, a work placement, and two qualification papers, including a Master thesis.

Text data makes up a significant portion of Internet traffic, second only to video and audio content. English and Russian are the top two most used languages on the Internet. These facts clearly show the market demand for specialists in the processing of text data in different languages, primarily in English and Russian. The programme is focused on emerging vacancies in emerging market segments, primarily in the field of data science and digital pedagogy.

• Business track graduates will be prepared for a career in applied language technology and find application in the rapidly growing information analytics market: text data analysis, conduct and analysis of promotions, sentiment analysis, big data journalism, creation and maintenance of information systems and in other areas. requiring a combination of humanitarian and computer knowledge.
• Graduates of the educational track will become specialists in creating online training systems, coordinators and leaders of online workshops in schools and universities, coordinators of online language programs, authors of electronic textbooks and tests, specialists in corporate online training.