Computational Linguistics and NLP Research in North American Linguistics Departments

This page highlights linguistics departments in North America where there is computational research aligned with the field of natural language processing (NLP). Such research would generally be published in ACL Anthology venues.¹ Universities are listed along with graduate programs and research areas of full-time faculty affiliated with linguistics.

NOTE: The list is not yet complete. To add your institution, edit this file and submit a pull request, or contact Nathan Schneider.

Boston University, Boston, MA [M.A./Ph.D. Linguistics]

• Najoung Kim - human & machine cognitive science, computational approaches to meaning, NLP evaluation

Brandeis University, Waltham, MA [M.S. Computational Linguistics, M.S./Ph.D. Computer Science]

• Constantine Lignos - natural language processing for less-resourced languages, annotation, morphology, language acquisition, psycholinguistics
• James Pustejovsky - natural language processing, lexical semantics, temporal and spatial reasoning, annotation, corpus linguistics
• Nianwen Xue - natural language processing, annotation, semantic role labeling, machine translation

Graduate Center, City University of New York, New York City [M.A./Ph.D Linguistics, M.A. Computational Linguistics]

• Martin Chodorow - language acquisition, proofreading
• Elena Filatova - text mining, natural language processing
• Kyle Gorman - phonology, morphology, finite-state methods, natural language processing
• Rivka Levitan - spoken language processing, intonation, discourse analysis
• Sarah Ita Levitan - natural language processing, speech processing, dialogue, paralinguistics
• Michael Mandel - machine learning, speech processing
• Alla Rozovskaya - natural language processing, machine learning
• William Sakas - natural language processing, machine learning, language acquisition

Cornell University, Ithaca, NY [Ph.D. Linguistics]

• Mats Rooth - semantics, prosody
• Marten van Schijndel - cognitive modeling, psycholinguistics, interpretability

George Mason University, Fairfax, VA [Ph.D. Linguistics]

• James P. Blevins - morphology, syntax, quantitative linguistics, history of ideas
• Géraldine Walther - typology, cognitive modeling, language documentation, morphology, syntax

Georgetown University, Washington, DC [M.S./Ph.D. Computational Linguistics, M.S./Ph.D. Computer Science]

• Nathan Schneider - semantics, syntax, corpora, parsing, evaluation
• Amir Zeldes - corpora, discourse, coreference, Digital Humanities, Coptic

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD [M.A./Ph.D. Cognitive Science]

• Kyle Rawlins - semantics/pragmatics, computational linguistics, semantic annotation
• Paul Smolensky - embedding compositional linguistic structure and processing in deep neural NLP systems, Optimality Theory, Gradient Symbolic Computation, phonology
• Colin Wilson - theoretical and experimental phonology/phonetics, computational models of phonology, computational cognitive science
• Jason Eisner (joint appointment; primary in Computer Science) - NLP, machine learning, combinatorial algorithms, probabilistic models of linguistic structure, declarative specification of knowledge and algorithms
• Ben Van Durme (joint appointment; primary in Computer Science) - natural language processing, data mining, social media analysis, machine learning, linguistic semantics, and generally most things Artificial Intelligence or Cognitive Science

Indiana University, Bloomington, IN [M.A./M.S./Ph.D. Computational Linguistics]

• Francis M. Tyers - language technology, indigenous languages, parsing, speech recognition, morphosyntax
• Sandra Kübler - machine learning, parsing, abusive language detection, corpus linguistics
• Damir Ćavar - semantics, knowledge graphs

McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada [M.A./Ph.D. Linguistics, M.S./Ph.D. Computer Science]

• Timothy O’Donnell - cognitive modeling, psycholinguistics, mathematical linguistics, probabilistic inference, interpretability
• Siva Reddy - semantics, syntax, parsing, interpretability
• Morgan Sonderegger - phonetics, phonology, language change, speech technology, statistical methods

Montclair State University, Montclair, NJ [M.S. Computational Linguistics]

• NLP Lab at Montclair
• Anna Feldman - figurative language processing, corpus linguistics
• Jing Peng - machine learning
• Aparna Varde - machine learning, data mining, NLP

New York University, Linguistics or Data Science, New York City [Ph.D. Linguistics, M.S./Ph.D. Data Science]

• Sam Bowman - natural language understanding, alignment, evaluation, syntax, semantics
• Tal Linzen - cognitive modeling, psycholinguistics, interpretability, evaluation

Northwestern University, Evanston, IL [Ph.D. Linguistics]

• Rob Voigt - computational sociolinguistics, interaction and embodiment, computational social science, NLP for social good

The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH [Ph.D. Linguistics]

• Micha Elsner - computational phonetics, phonology and morphology; language acquisition
• William Schuler - psycholinguistics; neurolinguistics; syntactic parsing and acquisition
• Michael White - spoken dialogue systems; language generation; categorial grammars

Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ [Ph.D. Linguistics]

• Simon Charlow - computational and formal semantics, semantic parsing, functional programming
• Adam Jardine - computational phonology, formal language theory, learning/grammatical inference
• Bruce Tesar - computational learning, parsing, Optimality Theory, phonology

San Diego State University, San Diego, CA [Certificate in Computational Linguistics, Certificate in Text Analytics, M.A. Linguistics]

• Gabe Doyle - psycholinguistics, pragmatics
• Mark Gawron - machine translation, semantics
• Rob Malouf - morphology, corpus linguistics, text mining

San José State University, San José, CA [Certificate in Computational Linguistics, M.A. Linguistics]

• Jon Rawski - mathematical linguistics, learnability, phonology

Simon Fraser University, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada [M.A. Linguistics, Ph.D. Linguistics]

• Maite Taboada - discourse, discourse parsing, sentiment analysis, evaluative language, corpus linguistics

Stanford University, Stanford, CA [M.S./Ph.D. Computer Science, M.A./Ph.D. Linguistics, M.S. Symbolic Systems]

• Judith Degen - experimental and computational semantics and pragmatics, psycholinguistics, cognitive science
• Dan Jurafsky - natural language processing, speech recognition, computational social science, cognitive science
• Christopher Manning - natural language processing, deep learning
• Christopher Potts - natural language processing, semantics, pragmatics, computational pragmatics

Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY [M.A. Computational Linguistics, Ph.D. Linguistics]

• Thomas Graf - mathematical linguistics, syntax, phonology, psycholinguistics
• Jeffrey Heinz - phonology, linguistic typology, mathematical linguistics, computational learning theory, planning and control
• Jordan Kodner - cognitive modeling, language acquistion, historical linguistics, low-resource NLP and evaluation
• Owen Rambow - morphology, syntax, semantics for computational linguistics and NLP
• Jiwon Yun - semantics, prosody, computational linguistics, cognitive science

Swarthmore College / Tri-College Consortium, Swarthmore, PA [B.A. in Linguistics]

• Jane Chandlee - phonology
• Rikker Dockum - phonology, historical linguistics, Southeast Asian languages
• Jonathan Washington - phonetics, phonology, marginalised languages, finite-state morphology and phonology, dependency syntax, rule-based machine translation, Turkic languages, historical linguistics

University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada [M.D.S. Computational Linguistics, M.A., Ph.D. Linguistics]

• Muhammad Abdul-Mageed - Arabic NLP, social media mining
• Miikka Silfverberg - neural interpretation, low-resource languages
• Jian Zhu - semi-supervised speech processing

University at Buffalo, Buffalo, NY [M.S. Computational Linguistics, Ph.D. Linguistics]

• Cassandra Jacobs - psycholinguistics, cognitive modeling, interpretability, annotation

University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA [Ph.D. Linguistics]

• Gasper Begus - speech processing, phonology, interpretable deep learning, generative modeling

University of California, Davis, Davis, CA [M.A./Ph.D. Linguistics]

• Emily Morgan - computational psycholinguistics, sentence processing, language evolution, programming language comprehension
• Kenji Sagae - data-driven natural language processing, automatic analysis of child language, Human Language Technology applications, multimodal processing and human communication dynamics

University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA [Ph.D. Language Science, M.S./Ph.D. Computer Science]

• Richard Futrell - computational psycholinguistics, information theory, corpus linguistics, dependency treebanks, cognitive modeling
• Sameer Singh - robustness and interpretability of machine learning, reasoning with text and structure

University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA [Ph.D. Linguistics]

• Simon Todd - psycholinguistics, cognitive modeling, phonetics, phonology, morphology

University of Chicago, Chicago, IL [Ph.D. Linguistics]

• Allyson Ettinger - analysis and evaluation of NLP systems, meaning extraction and predictive processing in humans and NLP systems, computational psycholinguistic modeling

University of Colorado Boulder, Boulder, CO [M.A./Ph.D. Linguistics, M.S. Computational Linguistics, M.S./Ph.D. Computer Science]

• Mans Hulden - modeling and learning natural language structure, particularly in the domains of morphology and phonology, using formal and machine learning methods
• Alexis Palmer - computational methods for endangered and low-resource languages and for language documentation, computational discourse and semantics, meaning representations, linguistically-informed NLP, offensive language detection

University of Florida, Gainesville, FL [M.A./Ph.D. Linguistics]

• Sarah Moeller - computational methods for language documentation/description and fieldwork, morphosyntax, human-in-the-loop
• Zoey Liu - crosslinguistic variation, multilingual low-resource NLP, language technology and documentation

University of Georgia, Athens, GA [M.A./Ph.D. Linguistics]

• John Hale - computational neurolinguistics, cognitive modeling, parsing

University of Maryland, College Park, MD [Ph.D. Linguistics]

• Naomi Feldman - computational psycholinguistics
• Philip Resnik - computational social science, NLP for mental health, computational neurolinguistics/psycholinguistics

University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA [M.A./Ph.D. Linguistics]

• Mark Liberman - phonetics, phonology, speech technology, annotation, NLP applications in medicine and social sciences
• Mitch Marcus - parsing, acquisition, annotation, morphology
• Charles Yang - language acquisition, processing, change

University of Rochester, Rochester, NY [M.A./Ph.D. Linguistics, M.S. Computational Linguistics, M.S./Ph.D. Computer Science]

• Aaron Steven White - semantics, lexical semantics, semantic parsing, information extraction

The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX [Ph.D. Linguistics, M.S./Ph.D. Computer Science]

• Katrin Erk - semantics, word embeddings, distributional methods
• Jessy Li - discourse processing, language generation, NLP in social contexts
• Kyle Mahowald - linguistic structure in language models, communicative efficiency, psycholinguistics, typology

University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada [M.A./Ph.D Linguistics]

• Ewan Dunbar - speech processing, phonetics, phonology, second-language perception
• Barend Beekhuizen - lexical semantics, cognitive science, language variation, typology, discourse analysis
• Shohini Bhattasali - computational neurolinguistics, cognitive science, psycholinguistics

The University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT [M.A./Ph.D. Linguistics]

• Aniello De Santo - mathematical linguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive modelling, syntax, phonology
• Caleb Belth - phonology, linguistic representations, language acquisition, psycholinguistics, linguistic variation

University of Washington, Seattle, WA [M.S. Computational Linguistics, Ph.D. Linguistics]

• Emily M. Bender - multilingual grammar engineering, computational semantics, computational linguistic typology, societal impacts of language technology
• Gina-Anne Levow - low-resource NLP, multilingual NLP, speech processing, prosody
• Shane Steinert-Threlkeld - computational approaches to semantics and typology, cognitive science + modeling, emergent communication, interpretability, multilingual NLP
• Fei Xia - corpus development, morphology, syntax, low-resource NLP, bioNLP

Yale University, New Haven, CT [Ph.D. Linguistics, Ph.D. Computer Science]

• Robert Frank - mathematical linguistics, syntax, analysis of neural networks
• Tom McCoy (starting January 2024) - neural network interpretability and evaluation, syntax, modeling of acquisition

1. If you are interested in starting a similar list for computational linguistics in another region or subfield, please reach out to Nathan Schneider! ↩