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

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, and focuses on the area of language technologies. The institute is home to 33 faculty with the primary scholarly research of the institute focused on

machine translation Machine translation is use of computational techniques to translate text or speech from one language to another, including the contextual, idiomatic and pragmatic nuances of both languages. Early approaches were mostly rule-based or statisti ...

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. It is also ...

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 langua ...

information retrieval Information retrieval (IR) in computing and information science is the task of identifying and retrieving information system resources that are relevant to an Information needs, information need. The information need can be specified in the form ...

parsing Parsing, syntax analysis, or syntactic analysis is a process of analyzing a String (computer science), string of Symbol (formal), symbols, either in natural language, computer languages or data structures, conforming to the rules of a formal gramm ...

, information extraction, 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 resul ...

, who served as director until his death in February 2020. He was followed by Jamie Callan, and then Carolyn Rosé, as interim directors. In August 2023, Mona Diab became the director of the institute.

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 (Multimodal Machine Learning),

Scott Fahlman Scott Elliott Fahlman (born March 21, 1948) is an American 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 pla ...

(Knowledge Representation), Justine Cassell (Human-computer interaction), Eric Nyberg (Information Retrieval), Carolyn Rosé (Learning Sciences), Eric Xing, and Alex Waibel (Speech Recognition), Rita Singh (voice forensics).

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

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 is a virtual assistant technology marketed by Amazon and implemented in software applications for smart phones, tablets, wireless smart speakers, and other electronic appliances. Alexa was largely developed from a Polish speech s ...

CognistX

Co-founded by LTI Professor and MCDS program director Eric Nyberg, The company's projects include work in targeted advertising, oil and gas, and psychedelic drug research.

References