Linguistic Data Sciences, Master of Arts (2 years)

Language use and linguistic data are essential in various disciplines today and in all areas of our digitalized society. It is widely recognized that society needs people who understand language as data, who can analyze linguistic data systematically. Master’s Degree Programme in Linguistic Data Sciences focuses on the interfaces between languages and digitalization in today’s world.This Master’s degree programme, taught entirely in English, provides an opportunity to study language in today’s digitalized society from a variety of perspectives: sociolinguistics, language technology, and translation. The core of this programme consists of a set of courses in empirical linguistics (syntax, phonetics, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, contact linguistics, translation studies, language technology) that offer various areas of specialization for the students.In addition, we cross disciplinary boundaries and collaborate with computer science as well as data sciences and statistics. This means that students are encouraged to choose from optional modules that be used to tailor the programme to suit individual needs. Many of the courses focus on text and speech data mining and big data analytics.Key questions that students encounter in this programme include:How does digitalization change languages?What types of digital tools are used to study languages?What kinds of text and speech data mining tools are available today?How are these digital tools and resources used?What types of everyday applications and assistive technologies for special needs (i.e.  synthetic speech, augmented translation) built on these tools exist?How can they benefit our daily life?How is language and its variation modelled quantitatively?How can geospatial modelling or multivariate analysis help modelling variability?What technological solutions are used in translation and multilingual communication today and what is their role in the future?