The Language Technologies Institute (LTI) is a research institute at

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

Pittsburgh Pittsburgh ( ) is a city in the Commonwealth (U.S. state), Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, United States, and the county seat of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, Allegheny County. It is the most populous city in both Allegheny County and Wester ...

Pennsylvania Pennsylvania (; ( Pennsylvania Dutch: )), officially the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, is a state spanning the Mid-Atlantic, Northeastern, Appalachian, and Great Lakes regions of the United States. It borders Delaware to its southeast, ...

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, and focuses on the area of

language technologies Language technology, often called human language technology (HLT), studies methods of how computer programs or electronic devices can analyze, produce, modify or respond to human texts and speech. Working with language technology often requires broa ...

. The institute is home to 33 faculty with the primary scholarly research of the institute focused on

machine translation Machine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT (not to be confused with computer-aided translation, machine-aided human translation or interactive translation), is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates t ...

speech recognition Speech recognition is an interdisciplinary subfield of computer science and computational linguistics that develops methodologies and technologies that enable the recognition and translation of spoken language into text by computers with the m ...

speech synthesis Speech synthesis is the artificial production of human speech. A computer system used for this purpose is called a speech synthesizer, and can be implemented in software or hardware products. A text-to-speech (TTS) system converts normal languag ...

information retrieval Information retrieval (IR) in computing and information science is the process of obtaining information system resources that are relevant to an information need from a collection of those resources. Searches can be based on full-text or other co ...

parsing Parsing, syntax analysis, or syntactic analysis is the process of analyzing a string of symbols, either in natural language, computer languages or data structures, conforming to the rules of a formal grammar. The term ''parsing'' comes from Lati ...

information extraction Information extraction (IE) is the task of automatically extracting structured information from unstructured and/or semi-structured machine-readable documents and other electronically represented sources. In most of the cases this activity concer ...

, and multimodal machine learning. Until 1996, the institute existed as the Center for Machine Translation, which was established in 1986. Subsequently, from 1996 onwards, it started awarding degrees, and the name was changed to The Language Technologies Institute. The institute was founded by Professor

Jaime Carbonell Jaime Guillermo Carbonell (July 29, 1953 – February 28, 2020) was a computer scientist who made seminal contributions to the development of natural language processing tools and technologies. His extensive research in machine translation result ...

, who served as director until his death in February 2020. He was followed b
Jamie Callan
and then Carolyn Rosé, as interim directors.

Academic programs

The institute currently offers two Ph.D. programs, four different types of master degrees and an undergraduate minor. The master's programs each offer a different focus or career target. The Master of Language Technologies (MLT) is a research-focused masters in which students take all the same classes as Ph.D. students, and are frequently funded through sponsored research projects. In effect, this means they work on grants with faculty the same as Ph.D. students, so most transition to Ph.D. programs after completion. The MLT serves as a bridging masters for students from non-traditional backgrounds or with limited research experience in language technologies. In contrast, the Master of Science in Intelligent Information Systems (MIIS), Master of Computational Data Science (MCDS), and Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence and Innovation (MSAII) focus more heavily on coursework and projects that prepare students for industry jobs. The MIIS and MCDS programs are also targeted at shorter (e.g. 16 month) completion times and require an industry internship during the program.

Faculty

Notable faculty include Alan W Black (Speech),

Louis-Philippe Morency Louis-Philippe Morency is a French Canadian researcher interested in human communication and machine learning applied to a better understanding of human behavior. Biography Dr. Louis-Philippe Morency is currently assistant professor at the Lang ...

(Multimodal Machine Learning),

Scott Fahlman Scott Elliott Fahlman (born March 21, 1948) is a computer scientist and Professor Emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University's Language Technologies Institute and Computer Science Department. He is notable for early work on automated planning and s ...

(Knowledge Representation),
Graham Neubig
(Machine Translation),

Justine Cassell Justine M. Cassell (born March 19, 1960) is an American professor and researcher interested in human-human conversation, human-computer interaction, and storytelling. Since August 2010 she has been on the faculty of the Carnegie Mellon Human Compu ...

, Eduard Hovy,

Eric Nyberg Eric Nyberg is a professor in the Language Technologies Institute of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He is the director for the Master of Computational Data Science (formerly known as the M.S. in Very Large Informatio ...

, and Eric Xing.

Spinoffs and Affiliated Companies

Safaba Translation Systems

Co-founded by LTI faculty member Alon Lavie in 2009, Safaba was acquired in 2015 by

Amazon Amazon most often refers to: * Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek mythology * Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin * Amazon River, in South America * Amazon (company), an American multinational technology c ...

and incorporated into the company's Pittsburgh offices. Once incorporated into Amazon's corporate structure, the Safaba team became known as the Amazon Machine Translation R&D Group, and would go on to contribute to the development of

Amazon Alexa Amazon Alexa, also known simply as Alexa, is a virtual assistant technology largely based on a Polish speech synthesiser named Ivona, bought by Amazon in 2013. It was first used in the Amazon Echo smart speaker and the Echo Dot, Echo Studio and ...

CognistX

Co-founded by LTI Professor and MCDS program director Eric Nyberg, CognistX is an adaptive AI company that collaborates with organizations across sectors to harness the power of machine learning and artificial intelligence. The company's projects include work in targeted advertising, oil and gas, and psychedelic drug research.

References

External links

Language Technologies Institute Official WebsiteSpeech Group at Carnegie MellonISL at Carnegie Mellon
Schools and departments of Carnegie Mellon Linguistics organizations Computational linguistics Translation organizations {{machine-translation-stub