Speech Hearing and Language Research Centre
Department of Linguistics
Macquarie University
Sydney, Australia
The Speech Hearing and Language Research Centre at Macquarie
University, Sydney is making its innovative MSc in Speech and Language
Processing course available via Distance Education starting in 2000.
The course is intended for graduates in Computer Science, Linguistics,
Electrical Engineering and Psychology who wish to become involved in
the growing Speech and Language Technology industry. Students are
given a grounding in the study of Speech and Natural Language
Processing by machine and then persue a specific topic in depth as they
complete a research project towards the end of the course. Past
projects have included speaker identification, language generation and
acoustic studies of accent variation. Projects are supervised by staff
members and often form part of larger research projects running in the
contributing departments.
The course has previously been offered only on-campus but a great deal
of interest has been shown by people working in the computer industry
wanting to upgrade their skills. The new Distance Education option
allows students to study part time over two years without having to
attend on-campus sessions. The course will use printed notes along
with CDROM and web based materials to cover what is often very
technical material. Students are required to have access to a Pentium
II based computer running Windows or Linux in order to run software for
speech and language processing. Each course will involve extensive
practical work which will have students building prototype language
processing systems and analysing samples of their own speech.
Macquarie is well placed to offer this course with world class research
groups in both the Linguistics Department, in which SHLRC is based, and
the Department of Computing. Together these groups have attracted
millions of dollars of funding from both government and industry for
their leading edge research. The Linguistics Department also has
extensive experience teaching their Master of Applied Linguistics via
Distance Education which attracts students from around the world.
Contact: Steve Cassidy,
Tel: +61 2 9850 8729,
Email: masters@srsuna.shlrc.mq.edu.au
Web: http://www.shlrc.mq.edu.au/masters