Graduate Program in Natural Language Processing

Natural language processing is a major area of research and graduate study in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Delaware. Current research interests center on developing theoretical formalisms to describe linguistic phenomena, algorithms for parsing, strategies for understanding and generation, the development of robust dialogue systems, speech, statistical and corpus-based approaches to natural language processing, and augmentative communication systems for people with severe speech impairments. The latter projects are enhanced by the Center for Applied Science and Engineering in Rehabilitation of the University of Delaware and the AI duPont Institute. A Cognitive Science Program brings in well-known speakers from throughout North America and serves as a forum for joint research efforts with faculty from the departments of Educational Studies, Linguistics, and Psychology. Members of our NLP group serve on the editorial boards of Computational Linguistics Journal, International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, and User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction Journal. In addition, they have served on the program committees or as program chairs for major conferences in natural language processing. Two of our faculty are currently officers of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

Current Faculty

• Timothy Bunnell, Research Associate Professor (joint appointment with Linguistics): Speech synthesis, speech processing, biological signal interfaces, neural networks.
• Sandra Carberry, Professor and Chair (joint appointment with Linguistics): Intelligent interfaces, natural language understanding, response generation, dialogue systems, user modeling, augmentative communication systems.
• Daniel Chester, Associate Professor (joint appointment with Linguistics): parsing.
• Kathleen McCoy, Associate Professor (joint appointment with Linguistics): natural language processing, text generation, discourse phenomena, sentence generation, rehabilitation engineering, computer-aided language learning.
• Vijay Shanker, Associate Professor: natural language processing, parsing, grammatical formalisms, sentence generation.