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gulabjamun

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  • Application Season
    2017 Fall
  • Program
    Master in Computational Linguistics

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  1. Hey! I got into Brandeis and got waitlisted at UW. I also got into Syracuse and Colorado Boulder (for their new CLASIC program). Brandeis is still sending out decisions, so you should wait! Any other Brandeis applicants out there? Does anyone have any idea what the costs and opportunities for assistantships are like?
  2. I don't have any close relationships with CS professors but I'll look into people who can talk about research experience and the self-taught stuff, I might know a suitable professor. And yeah, I'll be careful and contact schools directly then. Thanks!
  3. I am a recent mechanical engineering graduate in India and I just started working as an entry-level data analyst. I took introductory programming courses in college, and apart from that online courses in data structures and algorithms and now I'm pretty much learning a bunch of programming languages on the job. I am very interested in computational linguistics and would like to apply to master's programs in the US for Fall 2017. The problem is I haven't done any formal CS courses in college, or linguistics for that matter (again I've done a couple of MOOCs, and I worked on a linguistics writing sample on my own). I have taken a couple of foreign languages in college (I know three, apart from three Indian ones and English). That applicants may not have formal CS/linguistics education does not seem to be a problem for most of the programmes I'm applying to, but a couple mention the CS prerequisites quite clearly. So I've been thinking about getting an LOR from a mechanical engineering professor I worked with closely on a project, one from a humanities professor (who does classics/Sanskrit, I took a class with him and he knows about natural language processing because he's worked in it), and one from a foreign languages professor (lol). NONE of these people are directly related to CS or linguistics. I could get one from a mech professor but would that really help? Can't get one from work, it would jeopardise my job. If it's at all relevant, I have good GRE scores and a decent CGPA (all above 90th percentile, 8.16/10 which is like a distinction?) from a well-ranked university in India. Will my LORs being from unrelated fields wreck my application?
  4. That is some great advice, thank you! I will think about my focus and keep that in mind when writing my SOP. Funding is out of the question though, because I'm looking at taught master's programmes that don't offer it. Could you also tell me about your experience with LORs? Obviously I can't get any from professors in CS or linguistics, and not from work either because that would jeopardise my job. I was thinking one from a mechanical engineering professor I worked closely with, one from a Sanskrit/classics professor with experience in natural language processing (I didn't work with him on anything, only took a classics class with him but I've spoken with him a lot about the field and about my writing sample), and one from a foreign language professor, but I'm kind of doubting that now. I don't know if I should get another one from an engineering professor instead, because I don't know if that would help.
  5. Buffalo and Rochester offer MS degrees too. Colorado-Boulder has recently approved one so I'm guessing they'll start it next year. I'm a recent mechanical engineering graduate in India currently working in data science, and I'm very interested in MS computational linguistics programmes. I'm considering most of the universities mentioned here. I don't really have much experience in linguistics, apart from self-study and a couple of MOOCs. Apart from English, I know three Indian languages and three foreign languages, two at intermediate and one at elementary level. I have studied some programming and am learning to do it well for my job. I have good GRE scores (all above the 90th percentile) and a decent GPA (>8/10) in my degree, if that counts. If there is anyone here from a non-CS, non-ling background who is applying to/has applied to/is studying in computational linguistics programmes, or anyone who knows about it, please do tell us about your experience! I'd like to know if I stand a chance here.
  6. I think what I've done is talk about grammatical 'divergence patterns in machine translation', along with the challenges faced in the machine translation of Indian languages with regard to Indic scripts, availability of language data and cultural differences. There's a lot of papers on divergence patterns in language pairs on the internet, and some of them talk about techniques to solve these problems. I know two Dravidian languages and one Indo-Aryan language so I'm trying to compare them with regard to their language families as well. I tried to go for more of an overview because I don't have that much to say about one specific feature; I can't do any research and I don't know that much. Also the universities don't really ask for anything specific like research in linguistics or anything, it's like a 'writing sample that shows your scholarly ability/writing proficiency' or any sample of academic work, since it's for master's programmes. That's why I'm kind of unsure as to what they're looking for/how much I have to do. But I suppose I could water the writing down and talk about solutions, like you said.
  7. I am a recent engineering graduate in India, and I've been thinking about applying to computational linguistics master's programmes in the US. Some of these universities ask for a sample of academic work/writing sample. My problem is that I haven't done much writing, except for a long essay related to sociology/ancient Indian literature in an elective class. I decided to write something on my own in linguistics for applications, because I haven't taken any classes in linguistics at all (except for a couple of MOOCs) and this is the only way I can show them that I know (at least some) stuff. I wrote about the unique features of Indian languages, in terms of their usage, orthography, grammar and pragmatics, that present difficulties in developing rules for machine translation (MT) involving them. I wrote about three languages that I know, and a couple of techniques used in some papers on the topic. Now I don't really know if this is acceptable, because it doesn't have a thesis statement or any particular argument, except that MT is not all that easy (yeah I know give me a medal). I mean it's like a glorified wiki article - is this in any way acceptable?
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