UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Natural Language Processing PhD with Integrated Study

NLP is transforming the way humans communicate with each other and with machines. We have witnessed the rapid evolution of a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) systems that translate text, recognise or produce speech, answer questions, retrieve documents or facts, respond to commands, summarise articles, and simplify texts for children or non-native speakers.

The rapid proliferation of online news, social media, and scientific articles has created an exploding demand for NLP systems that enable people to derive critical insights from massive streams of data in many languages.

The demand for NLP practitioners in industry, science, commerce and the public sector outstrips supply.

A wide range of companies are aggressively recruiting well-trained NLP experts because there are relatively few available. The CDT is designed to meet this training need.

Graduates will be part of a new generation of researchers with the technical skills and interdisciplinary awareness to become leaders in NLP.

The CDT aims to attract students from a diverse range of backgrounds, including computer science, AI, maths and statistics, engineering, linguistics, cognitive science and psychology.

This interdisciplinary cohort requires a training approach that is more flexible than the standard three-year PhD, which is why this programme takes the form of a four-year PhD with integrated training.