Computer Laboratory > Admissions information > MPhil CSTIT

MPhil in Computer Speech, Text and Internet Technology

The MPhil in CSTIT is being run for the last time in 2009-2010; course admission for this final intake is already closed.

Some of the modules decribed on this site will be incorporated into the new M.Phil in Advanced Computer Science for the October 2010 intake as described here.

A one-year Masters course on the state-of-the-art in Speech and Language Processing and its application to Internet Technology

The main aim of the MPhil course in Computer Speech, Text and Internet Technology (CSTIT) is to teach the fundamental theory of speech and natural language processing and its use in a variety of advanced applications, especially those related to the Internet.

Speech Processing: analysis, speech recognition, speech synthesis
Language Processing (computational linguistics): syntax, parsing, semantics, discourse
Applications: information retrieval, information extraction, dialogue systems, machine translation, question answering.

The CSTIT is a one-year postgraduate course, which combines lectures, practicals, seminars and a substantial research project. It starts off with a term of taught material (lectures and structured practicals) covering the foundations of speech and language processing. In the second term, students attend lectures on more advanced topics, participate in a small group seminar in which they study and present material on a research topic, undertake two longer practicals and start on their research project. A dissertation is submitted in the third week in June and students give presentations on their projects in the last week in June.

The CSTIT provides a foundation for PhD level research or commercial speech and language technology development. Topics addressed by recent student projects have included: multi-document summarization, sentiment and topic classification, named entity recognition, ontology extraction, support vector machines, statistical language modelling, meeting transcription, multimodal fusion, Voice XML, voice conversion, prosodic boundary prediction and gesture-based interfaces.

The course is taught jointly by the Computer Laboratory (Natural Language and Information Processing group) and the Department of Engineering (Speech Research Group) in the University of Cambridge. Currently the main lecturers are: Prof Ted Briscoe, Dr Bill Byrne, Dr Ann Copestake, Dr Stephen Clark, Dr Adria de Gispert, Dr Mark Gales, Dr Paul Taylor, Dr Simone Teufel, and Prof Phil Woodland.

For more details, please see: