Ph.D. Program CMU-PORTUGAL in the area of Language and Information Technologies

From HLT@INESC-ID

Ph.D. Program Carnegie Mellon | PORTUGAL in the area of Language and Information Technologies

The Language Technologies Institute (LTI) of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University offers a dual degree Ph.D. Program in Language and Information Technologies in cooperation with Portuguese Universities. This Ph.D. program is part of the Carnegie Mellon | Portugal Partnership.

The Language Technologies Institute, a world leader in the areas of speech processing, language processing, information retrieval, machine translation, machine learning, and bio-informatics, has been formed 20 years ago. The breadth of language technologies expertise at LTI enables new research in combinations of the core subjects, for example, in speech-to-speech translation, spoken dialog systems, language-based tutoring systems, and question/answering systems.

The Portuguese consortium of Universities includes (but is not limited to) the Spoken Language Systems Lab (L2F) of INESC-ID Lisbon/IST, the University of Lisbon (FLUL), the University of Beira Interior (UBI) and the University of Algarve (UALG). These Universities share expertise in the same language technologies as LTI, although with a strong focus on processing the Portuguese language.

The LT program involves 1 or 2 new PhD students every year. Each Ph.D. student will receive a dual degree from LTI and the selected Portuguese University, being co-supervised by one advisor from each institute, and spending approximately half of the 5-year doctoral program at each institute.The academic part will be done during the first 2 years, including a maximum of 8 courses, with a proper balance of focus areas (Linguistic, Computer Science, Statistical/Learning, Task Orientation). The remaining 3 years of the doctoral program will be dedicated to research.

The thesis topic will be in one of the research areas of the cooperation program, defined by the two advisors. Two multilingual topics have been identified as primary research areas (although other areas of human language technologies may be also contemplated): computer assisted language learning (CALL) and speech-to-speech machine translation (S2SMT).

The doctoral students will be involved in one of the collaborative projects between LTI and the Portuguese Universities aimed at building real HLT systems.

The scholarship will be funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), Portugal.

How to Apply

The application deadline for the LT Ph.D. program in the scope of the CMU-Portugal partnership is December 15.

Students interested in the dual doctoral program must apply by filling the corresponding form at the [1] LTI webpage.

For more information about the joint degree doctoral program in LT, send email to the coordinators of the program:

  • Isabel.Trancoso at inesc-id dot pt
  • LTI_Portugal_Admissions at cs dot cmu dot edu

The applications will be screened by a joint committee formed by representatives of LTI and of the Portuguese Universities. The candidates should indicate their scores in GRE and TOEFL tests.

Despite the particular focus on the Portuguese language, applications are not in any way restricted to native or non-native speakers of Portuguese.

Program Highlights

REAP.PT project

PT-STAR project


See also

Priberam Machine Learning Lunch Seminars

Lisbon Machine Learning Summer School