About the Programme
A four year integrated training programme
The UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Natural Language Processing is jointly run by the School of Informatics and the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences and is funded by UK Research & Innovation (UKRI).
Its aim is to equip students with the fundamental skills for advanced research in NLP and language science, giving them foundations in: linguistics, machine learning, statistics, algorithms, programming, working with other modalities such as vision and design, ethics, and responsible innovation as they apply to NLP systems.
NLP is transforming the way humans communicate with each other and with machines. We have witnessed the rapid evolution of a wide range of natural language processing systems that translate text, recognise or produce speech, answer questions, retrieve documents or facts, respond to commands, summarise articles, and simplify texts for children or non-native speakers. The rapid proliferation of online news, social media and scientific articles has created an exploding demand for NLP systems that enable people to derive critical insights from massive streams of data in many languages.
Our four-year integrated training programme will give students a solid foundation in the challenge of working with language in a computational setting and its relevance to critical engineering, scientific and ethical problems in our modern world. It also offers training in the key software engineering and machine learning skills necessary to solve these problems. The programme aims to have a transformative effect as we train, and on the field as a whole, by developing future leaders and producing cutting-edge research in both methodology and applications.
The CDT brings together researchers in NLP, speech, linguistics, cognitive science, and design informatics from across the University of Edinburgh. Students are supervised by over 60 world-class faculty and benefit from cutting edge computing and experimental facilities. The CDT involves over 20 industrial partners, including Amazon, Facebook, Huawei, Microsoft, Naver, Toshiba, and the BBC. Links also exist with the Alan Turing Institute and the Bayes Centre.
Each student takes a set of courses tailored to complement their existing expertise: students with previous degrees in computer science or maths will take more linguistics based courses, while students with prior linguistics or cognitive backgrounds will take more programming and machine learning based courses. In the first year, they will also undertake both an individual and group research project with different supervisors, to gain breadth and experience of different working styles.
Students will receive full funding - Stipend (set by UKRI)and fees - for all four years, plus a generous allowance for travel, equipment and research costs.