ebs

There are definitely some folks coming into the Brandeis program with little to no linguistics experience, although I'd say it's more often the other way around -- people coming into the program with lots of linguistics and minimal CS experience. There's also a CS MS program at Brandeis, and a lot of those students cross-register in CL courses, so you certainly won't be lacking in terms of peers in terms of prior course experience. Brandeis is not crazy competitive, from what I've heard it's about a 50% acceptance rate. You're right the tuition is high (although not really any different from UW) and they offer very little in terms of financial aid. Going for outside scholarships is probably your best bet. The school itself is pretty great. All of the professors are very strong and highly influential in the field, the student body is diverse and motivated, and there's a really nice sense of community that you don't get as much at a program like UW where almost half of the students are doing online learning. The curriculum is as challenging as you make it -- you pay by the semester and not by the credit. It covers a wide range of CL-related topics, in particular computational semantics, machine translation, NER, and applied NLP. There are lots of cool research/internship opportunities in the Boston area, and a lot of folks stick around after graduating.

Heya, I'm currently in a CL MS program and would be happy to answer any questions folks might have about the application process or the program. I have a direct knowledge of applying to (and being accepted at) Brandeis, UW, and Indiana. Let me know if I can help! I'm also almost finished applying for CS PhD programs with a focus on CL/NLP (Stanford, UW, Berkeley, Boulder, CMU, Columbia). Good luck to everyone else in the same boat

Hi, sorry for jumping in really late here. I'm a student in the CLMS program at Brandeis and will be applying to PhD programs in the fall. If you're still deciding between offers, feel free to DM me and I'd be happy to give my advice/experiences.

AWARDED! Any other computational linguistics people lurking on this thread?

I started undergrad focusing on linguistics, primarily syntax but a little bit of everything. Junior year I began taking computer science courses and by the end of senior year I was pretty much only taking courses in cosi/NLP. I attended Brandeis as an undergrad so I was able to take grad-level CL courses as an undergrad. Prior experience outside of coursework was limited to some basic annotating I did remotely for a tech company. I should add that CL MS programs (and pretty much all master's programs in any field) are easier to get in to than many assume. They largely function as a money-maker for the school due to their limited financial aid. UW has the most competitive CLMS program out there and the year I applied I was told by one of the professor's there that the acceptance rate was ~20%, which was their most competitive year yet. My guess is Indiana has an acceptance rate of ~80%. Brandeis is ~40%.

Apologies for jumping in really late here, but you may want to consider applying for a master's degree in computational linguistics before applying for a PhD. (Good) PhD programs in CL are very competitive because of the rapidly increasing interest in the field and having a solid field-specific course background as well as having the opportunity to do original research in a professor's lab would really improve your application chances. I'd say to be competitive you need a solid understanding of most deep learning techniques in NLP (MLP, RNN, CNN, LSTM/Bi-LSTM, Autoencoders, etc.)

Hello again, not sure if anyone is actively following this thread at this point, but to followup to my last post: there will be no admitted students day at UW this spring. If you reach out to them, though, they will send an email to their listserv inquiring about couches available for crashing on (I was able to find lodging this way). I'm flying to Seattle today and will be meeting with the temporary head of the program tomorrow. If anybody has questions they'd like me to ask her about the program, I'd be happy to pass them along and let you know what she has to say.

Ooo thanks for the recommendations about travel/housing! I sent an email to the program coordinator a couple days ago about an admitted students day but haven't heard back yet. I figure it's because of the holiday

I've now heard back from the three programs I applied to. I've been accepted at all three -- Brandeis, University of Washington, and Indiana University. Happy to answer any questions folks might have about any of those programs. Does anyone know if there will be an admitted students day at UW? I'm planning to fly over there to visit but want to make sure there isn't a specific day before I buy my ticket....