PhD Programs for Computational Linguistics / Natural Lg Processing?

[Gradstudent101]

I've heard that Stanford (Ling and CS) and Johns Hopkins (CogSci and CS) are strong, but I'm looking to expand my list with other schools for the upcoming application season. Any information would be welcome as I'm just starting to really start my search process. For those in top CS Grad programs-- about how many courses in CS had you taken by the time of application? Do you feel it would be to my disadvantage if most of my CS courses are in applied areas (e.g. CompBio, AI, NLP) and do not include courses like Architecture, Systems, etc?

[Gita463]

This may help you (I just typed "best schools for NLP" in several different wordings in Google):

 

http://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-schools-for-studying-Natural-Language-Processing

http://woheronb.wordpress.com/2012/05/27/what-are-the-best-schools-for-studying-natural-language-processing/

[smmmu]

Cambridge also has what I think is a decent NLP group.

 

From what I've heard (purely anecdotally) it is advisable to apply to Stanford Linguistics, not CS, if one is interested in NLP.

[TheInfelicitousDandy]

These are schools I looked at when I was looking for programs with people doing speech recognition and NLP

 

MIT

University of Illinois

Johns Hopkins

Carnegie Mellon

University of Southern California

Georgia Institute of Technology

 

U of Toronto

U of Alberta

Simon Fraser University

University of Ottawa

[Gradstudent101]

From what I've heard (purely anecdotally) it is advisable to apply to Stanford Linguistics, not CS, if one is interested in NLP.

Stanford is definitely high on my list, so if possible, I'd be interested in hearing why people have said this.

Thank you guys for the links and lists! I'll start with those and hopefully work my way in narrowing things down.

Another question -- does anyone have a rough guideline as to how competitive these programs are? Maybe venture a ranking based on difficulty of admission? I believe I'm in contention for the top tier schools, though since it's kind of a long shot for anyone, I don't want to end up with 0 admission offers.

[smmmu]

My comment about Stanford was based on a conversation I had with a professor in that area, who told me that their students had been significantly more successful in getting into the Linguistics program than into the CS program and that overall there doesn't seem to be that much interest in NLP from the CS department there.

 

That aside, it may be that generally CS programs are more competitive than Linguistics programs.

 

-edit: Oh, and take that with the usual grain of salt of course, as I said it was one conversation with one professor, so about as anecdotal as it gets.

Edited April 20, 2013 by smmmu