Faculty of Modern Languages Computational Linguistics – Bachelor 50%

The Bachelor’s degree programme in Computational Linguistics with a weighting of 50% spans six semesters and covers the fundamentals of the subject, including working methods and materials, and provides students with step-by-step guidance on the development of practical applications. As in the Bachelor’s degree programmes with weightings of 75% and 100%, students spend the first three semesters building solid core knowledge of the subject area to prepare them for later course elements. They attend introductory lectures (with accompanying practice classes) in computational linguistics, theoretical linguistics, programming, mathematics and statistics. Students gain further, in-depth knowledge by attending two advanced courses. These advanced courses consist in specialist lectures with practice classes and seminars. Students benefit from a broad range of courses and lectures on offer, which are run by internal lecturers and professors from the Institute, as well as guest lecturers from research institutes and industry. Topics range from fundamental methods of modern computational linguistics to current issues in research and applications. Topics include neural networks, statistical machine translation, ethical aspects of computational linguistics and the recognition of sarcasm. In seminars, students receive relevant literature and have the opportunity to test practical applications in an accompanying implementation project. A further component of the degree programme is a software project, as part of which students work as a team to model a computational linguistic issue and implement a software solution. The Bachelor’s degree programme in Computational Linguistics with a weighting of 50% may be studied as a first or second major subject.