CMU has many varied sub departments within its CS and EE departments. One such department in LTI - which is the Language Technologies Institute. What goes on here? What sort of students make it here? And what are the funding opportunities for students who come for a Masters or PhD? We spoke with a current student - who wished to remain anonymous for this post. We had a couple of questions for which he had very interesting reponses which might prove helpful to a lot of prospective students. Here is the interview:

1. What course are pursuing at CMU?
Masters in Language Technologies. That means learning computer
languages and techniques to make a computer understand your languages.
I am working on automatic translation from Arabic to English.

2. What did you decide to pursue it and how is it going to help you further your career?

I like languages, and I always wanted to do something that involves both languages and computers. That was the main motivation behind choosing this program. Language technologies are slowly becoming ubiquitous.. Everytime we run a search query on the web, we touch this field. There is abundant information on the web now, finding it quickly (information retrieval) is very important, and so is it important to make the information more accessible (machine translation). It is annoying to talk to the crazy bots that guide you through the initial menu of customer service, and somebody needs to work to improve those interfaces. As the LTI webpage puts it, this field is about getting the right information to the right people at the right time in the right language and right media and at the right level of detail. That probably also hints at the broad career scope.

3. Can you give us an estimate of how much expenditure per semester is incurred at CMU

~ $350 in rent (shared accommodation)
~ $350 in rest of the things.

4. How are you funding yourself?

Thanks to LTI RA position. Their funding usually covers for tuition expenses and provides a reasonable stipend in addition.

5. How many students get funded yearly (out of those who join)?

All PhD students at LTI are funded. Most masters students receive funding from one of the departmental projects soon after they join. Over the last few years, almost all students have been lucky to receive support by within a semester after joining.

6. How does one start to approach profs for funding? Any insights you would like to share?

I think this answer might be too LTI specific, but then.. that’s my only experience.

LTI organizes a 2-week introductory session for new students. The faculty give talks and describe the research work going around it the department, and in their project groups. Sometimes they let the students know about openings in their projects. Some people, based on their background and skills, have a pretty good idea of what area of NLP they want to work on, so they can talk to the professors whose work is of relevance. Other people are newbies and are willing to work in a set of areas of work, without strong preference to others. During and after the introductory session, students talk to professors
individually and try to understand who might be the best person to work with. The LTI then conducts something called “Marriage Process”, where students fill up preferences of three profesors they might want to work with, and professors fill up similar form to find three students they might advice. Finally, students are matched to professors in a faculty meeting. Not all students find advisors here, they then continue to talk to professors of interest. As new funding is available, the remaining students find support. (In the mean time, some people start working with someone as an independent study —
work for credit, rater than for money.)