NLP schools

[cabby]

Are any of the following schools active and well-respected in natural language processing research? How about data mining research?

USC

UC Irvine

UCSB

UC Berkeley

UCSD

Columbia

Princeton

UCLA

Caltech

Harvard

Thank you.

Edited February 26, 2011 by cabby

[hiscoba]

Are any of the following schools active and well-respected in natural language processing research? How about data mining research?

USC

UC Irvine

UCSB

UC Berkeley

UCSD

Columbia

Princeton

UCLA

Caltech

Harvard

Thank you.

So you got admit to all these schools? Amazing!

I guess that you have already done a little bit study on the programs before applying to them.

Anyway, Berkeley is good, so is Columbia since they recently have Machael Collins.

Edited February 26, 2011 by hiscoba

[cabby]

So you got admit to all these schools? Amazing!

I guess that you have already done a little bit study on the programs before applying to them.

Anyway, Berkeley is good, so is Columbia since they recently have Machael Collins.

No, I didn't get into all of them. I was just curious about some of them.

Thanks. Did any other schools I listed have respectable programs, or are those the main ones?

[paritosh1010]

NLP -

USC

CMU LTI

Columbia

UMD

JHU

[BKMD]

I believe the schools with the biggest NLP programs are (in order of size) CMU, JHU, and USC (ISI).

Berkeley and Columbia don't have many people but they have very good people (Dan Klein at UCB, Julia Hershberg and Michael Collins at Columbia). Stanford also has a good group (Jurafsky and Manning wrote what I believe are the two most commonly used NLP textbooks).

Most of the other schools in your list don't have many big NLP people that I know of. I know Irvine has a good data mining group, and Princeton has David Blei who is also very big machine learning and often works in text applications. I don't know as much about the other schools.

[DezB88]

I believe the schools with the biggest NLP programs are (in order of size) CMU, JHU, and USC (ISI).

Berkeley and Columbia don't have many people but they have very good people (Dan Klein at UCB, Julia Hershberg and Michael Collins at Columbia). Stanford also has a good group (Jurafsky and Manning wrote what I believe are the two most commonly used NLP textbooks).

Most of the other schools in your list don't have many big NLP people that I know of. I know Irvine has a good data mining group, and Princeton has David Blei who is also very big machine learning and often works in text applications. I don't know as much about the other schools.

You forgot one of the best and most important (if not the most important): U Penn

I would re-rank them all as following (instead of size):

List of NLP schools that you will benefit the most if you get admitted and enroll in:

- CMU

- U Penn

- Stanford

- Columbia

USC, UMD, Berkeley are pretty much second tier

[symbolic]

I'm also getting ready to apply to NLP schools and have been discussing it with my advisers. So what I say here is a combination of their recommendations and my own broad-reaching research, done over a very long period of time (a few years, no joke). Caltech, UCI, and UCSB don't have much (if anything) in NLP. UCSD does somewhat, as with Roger Levy and Andy Kehler, but their research is on the psycholinguistic side (though Levy graduated from the NLP group at Stanford). UCLA used to, but their researchers in NLP either are adjuct or have left. The most I could find at Princeton was the WordNet project, but that's under cognitive science and isn't pure NLP. Harvard has two people--Stu Shieber and Barbara Grosz (but her research has diverged a bit); Shieber's a well-known name though.

As others said, the best places are CMU (LTI) and JHU (CLSP/HLTCOE). I really disagree that USC and UMD are second-tier--some of the most well-known people are in the NLP/CL groups at ISI and UMIACS. While Stanford doesn't have a single center for all that it does in the field, I'd say it's easily as good as JHU or CMU--the big names now are Dan Jurafsky (co-author of most widely used NLP intro book, also the only one to receive the MacCarthur Fellowship for work in computational linguistics) and Chris Manning (AAAI fellow and author of two widely-used books in NLP and IR). But also Stanford is the only university to have claim to two ACL Lifetime Achievement Award winners: Martin Kay and Lauri Karttunen. The former is going emeritus really soon but still teaches. The latter is a consulting professor but still teaches and does research with Stanford, though he's at PARC. Other PARC members that do NLP research with Stanford are Annie Zaenen, Cleo Condoravdi, and Ron Kaplan. Daphne Koller (also a MacCarthur fellow) and Andrew Ng in the CS department do work in NLP. Chris Potts, a linguist, does some work in computational semantics. And then there are the other affiliated organizations: the Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI), which has a computational semantics lab with many NLP folk, including Stanley Peters (a linguistics professor); and SRI International, which has an NLP group of its own and which collaborates with students and faculty at Stanford. Related work in AI is important for a strong NLP program, and the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) has other people working in machine learning, knowledge representation, etc.

Phew, enough plugging. Other great schools in NLP are

*Columbia - recently took Michael Collins away from MIT; has Julia Hirschberg and Kathy McKeown, among others working in related fields at CCLS

*MIT - Regina Barzilay is the only one left, though CSAIL has a lot of awesome AI people; also there's Robert Berwick who does similar work

*U Penn - soon to lose Aravind Joshi, and Fernando Pereira is pretty much indefinitely MIA; still has Mitch Marcus and more recently Ani Nenkova -- though I honestly don't see how U Penn could be considered anywhere near "the most important"; maybe it was before but not anymore

*Berkeley - the main person is Dan Klein, but come on--one glance at his CV and you'll see why he's one of the biggest names now; also Marti Hearst (iSchool), Jerry Feldman, and Robert Wilensky (one of the latter two was Jurafsky's adviser, can't remember which); ICSI does interesting related work

*Cornell - surprised nobody's mentioned it before; Claire Cardie, Lillian Lee, Mats Rooth, John Hale, Thorsten Joachims...

*UIUC - LOTS of people, just search for its NLP group

*U Washington - Emily Bender, Fei Xia, recently Luke Zettlemoyer, among others

*UT Austin - haven't looked much into it but was told it's one of the top ones--I'm not much interested in the South, though

Some other schools who have people that do work in the field: CU-Boulder (Martha Palmer, who left Penn a long time ago, and James Martin, co-author of the NLP book with Jurafsky), U Michigan (Dragomir Radev, secretary of the ACL now I think), U Rochester (James Allen and Lenhart Schubert), Ohio State, and Northwestern (Doug Downey, Larry Birnbaum). A recent PhD graduate of the Stanford NLP group suggested UMass to me, but I can't find much in the way of NLP/CL, at least not online. Anyone have an idea about that?

Here are a few interesting rankings of papers/people compiled from data in the ACL anthology--basically, the most cited researchers who publish in the typical venues in the field. Take it with a grain of salt, because it isn't all-inclusive. Notice, though, that three of the top-10 researchers by citation are at USC ISI.

http://clair.si.umich.edu/clair/anthology/rankings.cgi

That's about all I know. Hope that helps

[DezB88]

I'm also getting ready to apply to NLP schools and have been discussing it with my advisers. So what I say here is a combination of their recommendations and my own broad-reaching research, done over a very long period of time (a few years, no joke). Caltech, UCI, and UCSB don't have much (if anything) in NLP. UCSD does somewhat, as with Roger Levy and Andy Kehler, but their research is on the psycholinguistic side (though Levy graduated from the NLP group at Stanford). UCLA used to, but their researchers in NLP either are adjuct or have left. The most I could find at Princeton was the WordNet project, but that's under cognitive science and isn't pure NLP. Harvard has two people--Stu Shieber and Barbara Grosz (but her research has diverged a bit); Shieber's a well-known name though.

As others said, the best places are CMU (LTI) and JHU (CLSP/HLTCOE). I really disagree that USC and UMD are second-tier--some of the most well-known people are in the NLP/CL groups at ISI and UMIACS. While Stanford doesn't have a single center for all that it does in the field, I'd say it's easily as good as JHU or CMU--the big names now are Dan Jurafsky (co-author of most widely used NLP intro book, also the only one to receive the MacCarthur Fellowship for work in computational linguistics) and Chris Manning (AAAI fellow and author of two widely-used books in NLP and IR). But also Stanford is the only university to have claim to two ACL Lifetime Achievement Award winners: Martin Kay and Lauri Karttunen. The former is going emeritus really soon but still teaches. The latter is a consulting professor but still teaches and does research with Stanford, though he's at PARC. Other PARC members that do NLP research with Stanford are Annie Zaenen, Cleo Condoravdi, and Ron Kaplan. Daphne Koller (also a MacCarthur fellow) and Andrew Ng in the CS department do work in NLP. Chris Potts, a linguist, does some work in computational semantics. And then there are the other affiliated organizations: the Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI), which has a computational semantics lab with many NLP folk, including Stanley Peters (a linguistics professor); and SRI International, which has an NLP group of its own and which collaborates with students and faculty at Stanford. Related work in AI is important for a strong NLP program, and the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) has other people working in machine learning, knowledge representation, etc.

Phew, enough plugging. Other great schools in NLP are

*Columbia - recently took Michael Collins away from MIT; has Julia Hirschberg and Kathy McKeown, among others working in related fields at CCLS

*MIT - Regina Barzilay is the only one left, though CSAIL has a lot of awesome AI people; also there's Robert Berwick who does similar work

*U Penn - soon to lose Aravind Joshi, and Fernando Pereira is pretty much indefinitely MIA; still has Mitch Marcus and more recently Ani Nenkova -- though I honestly don't see how U Penn could be considered anywhere near "the most important"; maybe it was before but not anymore

*Berkeley - the main person is Dan Klein, but come on--one glance at his CV and you'll see why he's one of the biggest names now; also Marti Hearst (iSchool), Jerry Feldman, and Robert Wilensky (one of the latter two was Jurafsky's adviser, can't remember which); ICSI does interesting related work

*Cornell - surprised nobody's mentioned it before; Claire Cardie, Lillian Lee, Mats Rooth, John Hale, Thorsten Joachims...

*UIUC - LOTS of people, just search for its NLP group

*U Washington - Emily Bender, Fei Xia, recently Luke Zettlemoyer, among others

*UT Austin - haven't looked much into it but was told it's one of the top ones--I'm not much interested in the South, though

Some other schools who have people that do work in the field: CU-Boulder (Martha Palmer, who left Penn a long time ago, and James Martin, co-author of the NLP book with Jurafsky), U Michigan (Dragomir Radev, secretary of the ACL now I think), U Rochester (James Allen and Lenhart Schubert), Ohio State, and Northwestern (Doug Downey, Larry Birnbaum). A recent PhD graduate of the Stanford NLP group suggested UMass to me, but I can't find much in the way of NLP/CL, at least not online. Anyone have an idea about that?

Here are a few interesting rankings of papers/people compiled from data in the ACL anthology--basically, the most cited researchers who publish in the typical venues in the field. Take it with a grain of salt, because it isn't all-inclusive. Notice, though, that three of the top-10 researchers by citation are at USC ISI.

http://clair.si.umic...gy/rankings.cgi

That's about all I know. Hope that helps

I have a different way of seeing benefit, so I ranked differently.

I notice that all of the schools you mention have a large number of faculty and students in the NLP group.

So I believe you see the benefit as having a lot of people doing work in NLP.

I on the other hand see the benefit as having people who produce work that has high quality, it becomes the standard of the field.

Number of researches, the number of people and citation do not really matter to me.

Also, I completely left out JHU because I don't do stuff in speech. I am not sure that they are that highly regarded in text,

My prof did not even mention them when he told me a few schools I should be looking at. (He did mention USC though)

Anyway, for personal reason I have zero interest in any school in California

I only put in Stanford because of the text book :D

[symbolic]

I have a different way of seeing benefit, so I ranked differently.

I notice that all of the schools you mention have a large number of faculty and students in the NLP group.

So I believe you see the benefit as having a lot of people doing work in NLP.

I on the other hand see the benefit as having people who produce work that has high quality, it becomes the standard of the field.

Number of researches, the number of people and citation do not really matter to me.

Also, I completely left out JHU because I don't do stuff in speech. I am not sure that they are that highly regarded in text,

My prof did not even mention them when he told me a few schools I should be looking at. (He did mention USC though)

Anyway, for personal reason I have zero interest in any school in California

I only put in Stanford because of the text book :D

Well, my metric is more on the quality of the research, as well as the # researchers in the field--I'd say a culture of NLP is desirable for anyone interested in the field, but unsurprisingly the schools with a culture of NLP also have the best researchers. All of the schools I listed with asterisks have researchers with high impact--some of them with few people actually in NLP (MIT, Berkeley) but the people they do have are big names (Regina Barzilay, Dan Klein). I don't do anything in speech processing either; most of the work done at JHU isn't in speech though, especially now that Fred Jelinek is gone. Fun fact: three of JHU's professors in NLP (Yarowsky, Eisner, Dredze) graduated from U Penn, so you may have a point there. I'd argue it's hard to list any schools for NLP without mentioning JHU though--even so far as to say it might even be better than CMU LTI, which actually has few people solely in LTI. Most of the faculty they list are in MLD, etc.

It's funny you mentioned Stanford because of the textbook--the author of it does a lot of work in speech processing.

[DezB88]

Well, my metric is more on the quality of the research, as well as the # researchers in the field--I'd say a culture of NLP is desirable for anyone interested in the field, but unsurprisingly the schools with a culture of NLP also have the best researchers. All of the schools I listed with asterisks have researchers with high impact--some of them with few people actually in NLP (MIT, Berkeley) but the people they do have are big names (Regina Barzilay, Dan Klein). I don't do anything in speech processing either; most of the work done at JHU isn't in speech though, especially now that Fred Jelinek is gone. Fun fact: three of JHU's professors in NLP (Yarowsky, Eisner, Dredze) graduated from U Penn, so you may have a point there. I'd argue it's hard to list any schools for NLP without mentioning JHU though--even so far as to say it might even be better than CMU LTI, which actually has few people solely in LTI. Most of the faculty they list are in MLD, etc.

It's funny you mentioned Stanford because of the textbook--the author of it does a lot of work in speech processing.

Well, all 3 profs in NLP of Columbia came from U Penn.

I am telling you, U Penn is very very highly regarded, especially amongst profs

They have a shrinking size because they only let in very high quality faculty. They could have added profs like some other schools, but they choose to stay with the quality.

To be honest, I don't like Stanford either. But the text book has really become a standard, and I just cannot ignore them. If I do other people think I am ignorant

Edited March 5, 2011 by DezB88

[symbolic]

Well, all 3 profs in NLP of Columbia came from U Penn.

I am telling you, U Penn is very very highly regarded, especially amongst profs

They have a shrinking size because they only let in very high quality faculty. They could have added profs like some other schools, but they choose to stay with the quality.

To be honest, I don't like Stanford either. But the text book has really become a standard, and I just cannot ignore them. If I do other people think I am ignorant

Same goes for JHU, in the NLP community at least.

I agree Penn is excellent, but I'm not so sure the shrinking size is because they only let in very high quality faculty--there are plenty of high quality faculty to go around (Dan Klein, for example, could have gone to Penn but joined Berkeley when there were no faculty there whose sole work was in NLP). But they've lost all their heavyweights except for Marcus, which wouldn't make Penn the best in and off itself--after all, there are people whose citation impact is greater than or equal to Marcus (Claire Cardie at Cornell, for example). Joshi is a dinosaur, Pereira is on an eternal sabbatical at Google, etc. Ani Nenkova is on her way though.

Edited March 5, 2011 by symbolic

[BKMD]

A recent PhD graduate of the Stanford NLP group suggested UMass to me, but I can't find much in the way of NLP/CL, at least not online. Anyone have an idea about that?

For NLP specifically, UMass has Aria Haghighi (student of Dan Klein) and David Smith (student of Jason Eisner), but they also have a ton of prolific machine learning people who often focus on text, including Andrew McCallum and more recently Hanna Wallach.

I don't think anyone has mentioned it, but Edinburgh is also famous for NLP.

As for qualtiy vs quantity... I do think there is a benefit in choosing a school that has more than one person you could see as an advisor, since you never know if a professor will be there for a full 5 years, plus it's hard to know how an advisor will work out until you actually start working with them. Of course quality is more important. I think every school that's been mentioned so far has some very high-quality people.

[symbolic]

For NLP specifically, UMass has Aria Haghighi (student of Dan Klein) and David Smith (student of Jason Eisner), but they also have a ton of prolific machine learning people who often focus on text, including Andrew McCallum and more recently Hanna Wallach.

I don't think anyone has mentioned it, but Edinburgh is also famous for NLP.

As for qualtiy vs quantity... I do think there is a benefit in choosing a school that has more than one person you could see as an advisor, since you never know if a professor will be there for a full 5 years, plus it's hard to know how an advisor will work out until you actually start working with them. Of course quality is more important. I think every school that's been mentioned so far has some very high-quality people.

Ah, the person I had talked to who suggested UMass was probably thinking of Aria Haghighi, whom she was a postdoc with. She was also suggesting to look for schools with strong machine learning faculty (something like 'a lot of NLP is about taking some hot new machine learning method and applying it to your problem'), so that's probably why she mentioned UMass as a 'top' school.

If we're talking international schools, Stuttgart and Saarland both have bad-ass departments dedicated to CL. If I spoke German, they'd totally be on my list.

The reason I'd want quantity over just quality (I'd choose JHU or CMU over Penn or MIT) is that when there's a lot of faculty with interests similar to yours, you have more chances for collaborations, not just with them but with their grad students. Lots of "cross-pollenation" among the different sub-areas of NLP. Of course quality is important too; I'd choose Penn or Berkeley over, say, Cornell. But all the schools mentioned with high numbers have top faculty, anyway.

[BKMD]

I can agree with that. I feel like I get more from working with a variety of people, since there's only so much one person can teach you.

[OH YEAH]

I'd go to JHU just to work with this guy... what a kickass mustache!

Edited March 8, 2011 by OH YEAH

[symbolic]

I can agree with that. I feel like I get more from working with a variety of people, since there's only so much one person can teach you.

True. Also one of my advisers suggested that there's more and more pressure on the 'next generation' of NLP researchers (mainly in academia, not so sure about industry research) to 'publish or perish.' Because conferences are the standard publication venue and there's so much uncharted territory in the field (given how interdisciplinary it is), it's become commonplace to see professors who publish 10+ papers a year; and the grad students with the most papers, unsurprisingly, get the best positions after graduation. But in so many of those papers, they aren't the first, or even second author; they're listed though. As self-serving as this sounds, having more people to collaborate means more papers to publish, even if your name isn't first. Which is better for your future given how much people in the NLP community publish (esp. since there are so many conferences/workshops/journals to publish in).

I'd go to JHU just to work with this guy... what a kickass mustache!

Hahaha, that's what I call the Frida face!

[Valiant]

How relevant would it be for a Masters applicant to select a school based on its NLP impact? Mostly we have a course-work focused track albeit with a thesis option and most Masters students are not allowed to be part of research groups. With all these details in hand which would be wiser for me?

 

To select a school on CS department reputation or the NLP factor?

[albert_hawking]

How relevant would it be for a Masters applicant to select a school based on its NLP impact? Mostly we have a course-work focused track albeit with a thesis option and most Masters students are not allowed to be part of research groups. With all these details in hand which would be wiser for me?

 

To select a school on CS department reputation or the NLP factor?

 

Can someone please answer this question? I'm a masters applicant for Fall '15.

[milara]

Can someone please answer this question? I'm a masters applicant for Fall '15.

I think the answer is, "It depends." What are your goals after your masters degree?

[albert_hawking]

I think the answer is, "It depends." What are your goals after your masters degree?

I'd like to work in industry for a couple of years (just to get rid of any loans quickly) and then pursue research. Most probably machine translation or dialogue systems, but it's too early to decide. I am interning for the last six months at IIT Bombay and my work is on evaluation of SMTs. No papers yet though. 

I think it's fairly important that I be able to work in a lab while getting my masters.