New Program in Language Engineering

The Department of Linguistics at Montclair State University is delighted to open its new undergraduate program in Language Engineering, the ideal major for students who are intrigued by both language and the power of computation.

This new undergraduate program, opening in the Fall of 2018, draws on the Department of Linguistics’ faculty expertise to offer undergraduates a program that provides a foundation of study in linguistic theory and a selection of electives in language engineering, including opportunities for internships with technology companies and governmental organizations.

Career opportunities
Tech companies are increasingly looking to hire BA- or MA-level linguists for roles including: knowledge engineers, media analysts, translation technology specialists, research linguists, speech scientists, embedded software engineers, voice user interface designers, knowledge management engineers, text analytics software testers, Natural Language Processing modeling engineers, and search engine software development engineers, among others.

What is Language Engineering?
Language engineers use their knowledge of linguistics to improve human-computer interactions, such as speech and voice recognition, predictive text, voice-command interfaces, spelling and grammar checkers, machine translation, document summarization, search algorithms, and text-to-speech synthesis.

Get real-world experience before you graduate
The Department of Linguistics Advisory Board includes representatives from technology companies and governmental organizations. We work with the board members to find internship opportunities and job placements for our students and alumni. In addition, some faculty members hire students to collaborate on research funded by the National Science Foundation. We also provide mentorship for students’ original research and funding for travel to present their work at national or international conferences.

Who are the instructors?
The program is led by six full-time members in Linguistics and Computer Science. Occasionally, we invite adjunct faculty from academia and industry to teach some of the Language Engineering-related classes.

Learn more
Visit our Department of Linguistics website for more information on this program and the faculty that you’d study with. Visit the Undergraduate Admissions website for more information on applying to Montclair State University. The Department of Linguistics also offers graduate programs providing advanced study in these topics including a Certificate in Computational Linguistics and an MA in Applied Linguistics.