Programs like CMU's LTI PhD

[porous]

Hi all, I am a prospective PhD application for this round of admissions. I'm doing a BA + MS at the same school for Computer Science, and should get my Masters this May. I was looking into PhD programs that fit my experience and interests, and I saw that Carnegie Mellon's Language Technologies Institute offers pretty much exactly what I am looking for. Do you all have any recommendations as to any school with similar programs?  My interests are in speech and natural language processing, and I have related research experience + internships.

I'm coming at applications from more of a linguistics background (did a minor in undergrad), which is what the LTI seems to emphasize more than regular CS PhDs. I don't have the strongest machine learning background, and I understand that more statistics-driven side is very, very competitive, and not exactly what I'm interested in. Of course I'm thinking about all the well known CS programs, but what else is there? Thanks!

[wagyubeef]

I can speak for the linguistic side, but JHU and UMass have very strong NLP advisors, of course nowadays NLP/computational linguistic focus on statistical method. Keep in mind that programs don't matter as much as your advisor. So you probably want to look through recent years' ACL/EMNLP/COLING etc and find professors that you want to work with.

[peanutjellyfish]

I would say Carnegie Mellon is unique in that it has a PhD program specifically for NLP-related things. Try looking into some Information Schools with faculty who do NLP (UMichigan, Berkeley, Cornell, etc) and Data Science programs (e.g. NYU) that may have programs that aren't regular CS. 

Edit: Stanford Linguistics and University of Maryland Linguistics are also unusually heavy in computational research. 

Edited November 6, 2018 by peanutjellyfish