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Computational linguistics is the science of understanding and modeling human language using computers. Since human language has many forms – spoken, signed and written – and involves various organs such as the vocal tract, ears, face, hands, eyes, and the brain, our research covers the full range of these modalities and senses.
Many applications of computational linguistics fall under the broader umbrella of Artificial Intelligence (AI), including natural language processing, chatbots, speech and voice recognition, machine translation, sign language processing, text classification, and information extraction from eye movements. Several of the most recent advancements in Generative AI, such as Large Language Models (LLMs), are genuine computational linguistics applications. In addition, language extends over multiple modalities, rendering Generative AI advancements such as text-to-image models also relevant for our department.
Interdisciplinary research performed in our department includes the neuroscience of speech and hearing, the study of speech variability, and the archiving of historical phonograms for linguistic analysis.
Our research groups are involved in both research and university teaching on all levels:
Text Technology (Prof. Martin Volk, Prof. Rico Sennrich, Prof. Gerold Schneider)
Phonetics & Speech Sciences (Prof. Volker Dellwo, Prof. Eleanor Chodroff)
Digital Linguistics (Prof. Lena A. Jäger)
Computational Neuroscience of Speech & Hearing (Prof. Nathalie Giroud)
Language, Technology and Accessibility (Prof. Sarah Ebling)
Language Technology (Dr. Srikanth Madikeri Ragunathan)
We have been offering degree programs in computational linguistics since 1994. In 2001, our Department of Computational Linguistics was established. Since 2017 we have a research group for Phonetics & Speech Signal Processing, and we have been growing steadily since then, expanding our research activities in multiple modalities of language processing.
Our researchers have published more than 1,000 articles and books in top venues, including ACL, COLING, NeurIPS, EMNLP, Interspeech, Journal of Phonetics, Journal of Memory and Language, and Scientific Reports. Language technology algorithms conceived by our researchers are deployed inside ChatGPT, Llama and Midjourney.
The Department of Computational Linguistics is located on the Oerlikon Campus.
