ACO*HUM Computational Linguistics

Survey on CL education: Results


In March 1999, a survey was conducted to establish the state of the art in Computational Linguistics programmes across Europe. The survey was conducted by on-line questionnaire on the Web. An invitation to fill out the questionnaire was sent out to approximately one hundred persons at European departments teaching CL, as well as to several e-mail distribution lists. One member per department was requested to fill out the questionnaire. 68 answers were received, of which 63 were complete and without error; these came from 60 different universities. An overview of the results obtained is presented below.


     
     
  1. What is the name of your university?
  2. Aston University
    Charles University, Prague
    Dublin City University
    Escola Universitaria Politecnica de Mataro
    Facultés Universitaires N.D. de la Paix - Namur 
    Gerhard-Mercator-Universität Duisburg
    Göteborg University
    Heriot-Watt University
    Imperial College, London University
    Linköpings universitet
    Malaga
    Maynooth University
    Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)
    Oxford Brookes University
    Queen's University of Belfast
    Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
    Ruhr-Universitaet Bochum
    Stockholm university
    Sunderland
    Technical University of Madrid
    Technische Universität Berlin
    The University of Leeds
    Trinity College, University of Dublin
    UMIST
    Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
    Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
    Universidad Complutense
    Universidad Complutense de Madrid
    Universidad Nacional de Educacion a Distancia
    Universidad Politécnica de Valencia
    Universidad de Alicante
    Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria
    Universidade Nova de Lisboa
    Universidade da Coruña
    Universidade de Vigo
    Universitaire Instelling Antwerpen (UIA)
    Universitetet i Bergen
    University College, Cork
    University of Aberdeen
    University of Alicante
    University of Bologna Italy
    University of Essex
    University of Geneva
    University of Geneva
    University of Helsinki
    University of Hull
    University of Lausanne
    University of Limerick
    University of Malta
    University of Neuchâtel
    University of Nijmegen
    University of Osnabrück
    University of Saarland
    University of Stuttgart
    University of Sussex
    University of Tartu
    University of Twente
    University of Ulster
    University of Zurich
    University of the Basque Country
    Università Ca' Foscari
    Université Paris 7
    Uppsala universitet

     
  3. Which name describes closest the name of your department?
  4. Computer science 26 **************************
    Linguistics 15 ***************
    Computational linguistics 8 ********
    Foreign language (e.g. German department in Spain) 3 ***
    Humanities computing 2 **
    Native language (e.g. German department in Germany) 2 **
    Multilingual Information Processing 1 *
    Computing and Electrical Engineering 1 *
    Telecommunications 1 *
    Electrical Engineering 1 *
    Signal Processing and Telematics 1 *
    English Linguistics 1 *
    Language and Speech 1 *
    Germanic Philology 1 *

     
  5. Which name describes best the faculty where your department is located?
  6. Humanities 28 ****************************
    Engineering 14 **************
    Mathematics and sciences 9 *********
    Social sciences 1 *
    Languages 1 *
    Translating and Interpreting 1 *
    Sciences and Humanities 1 *
    Cognitive and Computing Sciences 1 *
    Philology 1 *
    Informatics 1 *
    No faculties in organisation 3 ***

     
  7. Is CL offered at undergraduate level:
  8. As courses in another subject 24 ************************
    As a computational linguistics degree 20 ********************
    As a joint degree with another subject 4 ****

     
  9. Is CL offered at masters level:
  10. As a computational linguistics degree 25 *************************
    As courses in another subject 21 *********************
    As an option or specialization in another subject 16 ****************
    As a joint degree with another subject 2 **

     
  11. If your department offers a full degree or specialization in CL, what is your approximate yearly number of new students starting on this degree or specialization?
  12. Average 12.7

     
  13. What is the proportion of women among your CL students?
  14. Average 40.2 %

     
  15. How many staff members are teaching CL? (Total expressed as full-time units):
  16. Average 1.8

     
  17. In which country is your institution located?
  18. Spain 15 ***************
    UK 13 *************
    Germany 7 *******
    Switzerland 5 *****
    Ireland 5 *****
    Sweden 4 ****
    The Netherlands 3 ***
    Belgium 2 **
    Italy 2 **
    Norway 2 **
    France 1 *
    Czech Republic 1 *
    Finland 1 *
    Portugal 1 *
    Estonia 1 *
    Malta 1 *

     
  19. Which core topics are offered?
  20. Parsing algorithms 49 *************************************************
    Formal grammars 45 *********************************************
    Introduction to linguistics 42 ******************************************
    Representation of lexical knowledge 40 ****************************************
    Formal semantics 38 **************************************
    State of the art grammar formalisms 35 ***********************************
    Mathematics and logic 32 ********************************
    Pragmatics techniques 23 ***********************
    Corpus linguistics, statistical language modelling 6 ******
    Phonetics and phonology 4 ****
    Natural language / text generation 4 ****
    Morphology 3 ***
    Statistical methods 3 ***
    Natural Language Processing 1 *
    Theories of the lexicon 1 *
    Language pedagogy 1 *
    Markup languages 1 *
    Foreign language 1 *
    Procedural programming 1 *
    Algorithms and data structures 1 *
    Quantitative linguistics 1 *
    Automated reasoning 1 *
    Connectionist computing 1 *
    Second language acquisition 1 *

     
  21. Which application-oriented topics are offered?
  22. Machine translation 18 ******************
    NL interfaces 18 ******************
    Information retrieval 17 *****************
    Speech technology 8 ********
    Computer-assisted language learning 6 ******
    Computer-aided translation 2 **
    Speech and Image Processing 1 *
    Information design 1 *

     
  23. What is the proportion of teaching methods used?
  24. Lectures 47.7 %
    Individual exercises and projects 23.5 %
    Group projects 13.9 %
    Discussion groups 10.3 %
    Web courses 3.6 %
    Other  2.2 %

    Other: computer-mediated conferencing, (lab-based) tutorials, training period in private/public CL lab, seminar series, literature courses, paper reading/presentation/discussion groups

    URLs to web courses:
     
    http://fasting.hf.uib.no/~desmedt/cursus/webcourses.html
    http://gplsi.dlsi.ua.es/sepln/sepln.html
    http://ixa.si.ehu.es
    http://nlp01.cs.ul.ie/nlp_demo.html
    http://protos.dis.ulpgc.es
    http://wave.cs.tu-berlin.de/~ww/lehre/compling/
    http://www.cee.hw.ac.uk/~alison/nl/details.html
    http://www.cirfid.unibo.it/project/ile
    http://www.cl.ut.ee/ee/kursused/www_hoim/arv_leks_sj.html
    http://www.cl.ut.ee/ee/kursused/www_kmuis/korp_ling_sj.html
    http://www.cogs.susx.ac.uk/lab/nlp/gazdar/teach/nlp/nlp.html
    http://www.cs.ut.ee/~koit/AL/ALplaan.html
    http://www.cs.ut.ee/~koit/SissejALplaan.html
    http://www.cs.ut.ee/~koit/Tehisintellekt/TIplaan.html
    http://www.cs.ut.ee/~roosmaa/KT98.html
    http://www.cs.ut.ee/~roosmaa/MT98.html
    http://www.dslo.unibo.it
    http://www.ifi.unizh.ch/CL/InteractiveTools.html#as-h2-3296
    http://www.ifi.unizh.ch/CL/hess/classes/dsa
    http://www.ifi.unizh.ch/CL/hess/classes/ecl1
    http://www.ifi.unizh.ch/CL/hess/classes/ecl2
    http://www.ifi.unizh.ch/CL/hess/classes/mki
    http://www.ifi.unizh.ch/CL/hess/classes/sma
    http://www.ifi.unizh.ch/CL/volk/LexMorphVorl
    http://www.ifi.unizh.ch/CL/volk/SyntaxVorl
    http://www.leeds.ac.uk/students/tpmodules/comp5141.htm
    http://www.leeds.ac.uk/students/ugmodules/comp.htm
    http://www.leeds.ac.uk/students/ugmodules/comp1300.htm
    http://www.leeds.ac.uk/students/ugmodules/comp2040.htm
    http://www.leeds.ac.uk/students/ugmodules/comp2100.htm
    http://www.leeds.ac.uk/students/ugmodules/comp2251.htm
    http://www.leeds.ac.uk/students/ugmodules/comp2300.htm
    http://www.leeds.ac.uk/students/ugmodules/comp3310.htm
    http://www.ling.helsinki.fi/courses
    http://www.linglink.lu/
    http://www.lsi.upc.es/~acquilex/demoGATE/sepln98.html
    http://www.uzei.com/scripts/uzei/Euskalterm.cfm

     

  25. What is the proportion of the following learning activities?
  26. Listening to lectures 42.9 %
    Writing programs 22.5 %
    Using ready-made computer tools 14.3 %
    Doing excercises on paper 12.4 %
    Other  7.8 %

    Other: individual reading and research, writing essays and reports, giving presentations, discussions, reading literature, data collection
     

  27. Where do graduates go to?
  28. Industry 62.9 %
    Academia 32.4 %

     
  29. Which are the main programming languages used in teaching?
  30. Prolog 40 ****************************************
    Java 18 ******************
    C and C++ 16 ****************
    Lisp 12 ************
    Perl 6 ******
    Pascal 3 ***
    Elu 1 *
    Tcl/Tk 1 *
    Visual Basic 1 *
    Ada 1 *
    Oberon 1 *
    Eiffel 1 *
    Awk 1 *

     
  31. Which are the main platforms used in teaching?
  32. Windows 38 **************************************
    Unix 37 *************************************
    Linux 11 ***********
    Mac 9 *********

     
  33. Which main textbooks are used for introductory courses in CL?
  34. J. Allen (1995), "Natural Language Understanding"
    G. Gazdar and C. Mellish (1989), "Natural Language Processing in PROLOG"
    R. Grishman (1986), "Computational Linguistics"
    Bates and Weischedel, "Challenges in Natural Language Processing"
    A. Sågvall Hein, "Introduktion till språkteknologi, by Anna Sågvall Hein"
    M.A. Covington (1994), "Natural Language Processing for Prolog Programmers"
    L.Moreno, M.Palomar, A.Molina, A.Ferrández (1999), "Introducción al Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural"
    C. Beardon, D. Lumsden, G. Holmes (1991), "Natural Language and Computational Linguistics. An Introduction."
    I. Bratko (1994). "Prolog programming for artificial intelligence"
    B. Partee, A. ter Meulen and R. E. Wall (1990), "Mathematical methods in linguistics"
    G. Chierchia and S. McConnell-Ginet (1996), "Meaning and grammar : an introduction to semantics"
    L.T.F. Gamut, "Logic, language, and meaning"
    B.J. Grosz, K. Sparck Jones, B.L. Webber (1986), "Readings in Natural Language Processing"
    R. Delmonte (to be published), "Computational Text Processing"
    F.C.N. Pereira & B.J. Grosz (eds.) (1994), "Natural Language Processing"
    M. Rosner & R. Johnson (1992), "Computational Linguistics and Formal Semantics"
    B.L. Pritchett (1992), "Grammatical Competence and Parsing Performance"
    M.A. Covington, (1994), "Natural Language Processing for Prolog Programmers"
    B. Gambäck, J. Karlgren and C. Samuelsson, "Natural Language Interpretation"
    Bos and Blackburn (to appear), "Representation and Inference for NL"
    F.C.N. Pereira and S. Shieber (1987), "Prolog for Natural Language Analysis"
    H. Kamp and U. Reyle (1993), "From Discourse to Logic: An Introduction to Model-theoretic Semantics of Natural Language, Formal Logic and Discourse Representation Theory"
    G.W. Smith (1991), "Computers and Human Language"
    S. Shieber (1986), "An Introduction to Unification-Based Approaches to Grammar"
    F. Jelinek (1998), "Statistical Methods in Speech Recognition"
    P. Sells, "Lectures on Contemporary Syntactic Theories"

     
  35. Which ready-made tools and resources are used in teaching?
  36. Corpora 35 ***********************************
    Wordnet 18 ******************
    PC-Kimmo 10 **********
    LFG-Workbench 6 ******
    PC-PATR 2 **
    Globalink translator 2 **

    Other tools:
     
     
    FSA
    Hdrug
    XUXEN spelling checker, MORFEUS morphological analyzer, PATR-II for Basque, Constraint Grammar for Basque
    Malaga
    Morphological analysis for Spanish
    Gazdar and Mellish' grammars
    Uppsala Chart parser
    MULTRA
    SCARRIE
    Språktåget
    Flexible Typed Feature Structure Grammar
    ADAPT
    Parasite
    G-LOG
    G-LISP
    X-TAG grammar for analysis of French
    G-TAG grammar for generation of French
    GETA_RUN
    IMMORTAL
    Microsoft Frontpage
    Concordance programmes
    Statistical Computer Packages
    MPARSE
    Speech synthesis tools integrated with Open Prolog on the Macintosh
    CLUES (database tool for designing exercises in syntax)
    BACK (knowledge representation)
    KIT-FAST MT system
    LDOCE online tools
    Bill Black's ADAPT parser
    Xmfed (feature structure viewer)
    ALE
    Edinburgh DCG package
    Abbotdemo speech recogniser
    MS Agent speech synthesis and dialogue
    Turing's world
    Tarski's world
    Personal Translator
    T1
    Systran
    ViaVoice Gold a
    QDATR
    ZDATR
    TACT
    Xerox finite state tools
    TRACE
    tlearn
    a web-based tool for exploring derivations with PSGs
    computer-mediated conferencing
    Finite State automata
    Parser-generator for two-level grammar formalisms
    various unnamed language-specific and general parsers, POS-taggers, semantic networks, morphological analysers, stemmers and spell checkers
    various unnamed corpus analysis tools

     

  37. Which is your main language of instruction?
  38. Spanish 19 *******************
    English 19 *******************
    German 8 ********
    French 6 ******
    Dutch 4 ****
    Swedish 4 ****
    Norwegian 2 **
    Italian 2 **
    Portuguese 1 *
    Finnish 1 *
    Czech 1 *
    Estonian 1 *

     
  39. Which languages are the targets of processing?
  40. English 49 *************************************************
    Spanish 39 ***************************************
    German 26 **************************
    French 19 *******************
    Italian 9 *********
    Swedish 5 *****
    Dutch 4 ****
    Irish 4 ****
    Japanese 3 ***
    Russian 3 ***
    Finnish 3 ***
    Polish 3 **
    Norwegian 2 **
    Czech 2 **
    Catalan 2 **
    Greek 1 *
    Portuguese 1 *
    Bulgarian 1 *
    Slovanian 1 *
    Chinese 1 *
    Medieval Portuguese 1 *
    Turkish 1 *
    Galician 1 *
    Basque 1 *
    Hindi 1 *

     
  41. How many students are currently enrolled in the degree program?
  42. Average 53.1

     
  43. How many of these students are this year taking part of their education abroad?
  44. Average 3.2

     
  45. How many visiting/exchange students from abroad do you have this year?
  46. Average 3.1

     
  47. Does the degree require an obligatory traineeship/placement?
  48. No 34 **********************************
    Yes 26 **************************

     
  49. Which kind of innovations in the education of CL are you considering in your department or hoping for will come in the near future?
  50. Ideally the CL community could get together so each site offers a module to a common pool, perhaps even distance-teaching each others' students
    Use of Merlin environment developed at Hull
    A corpus-based grammar (writing) tutoring system
    More professional students, e.g. teachers
    CL within broader subjects, inc AI (50students/2yrs)
    We enlarge the course to a undergraduate and graduate program in cognitive scien ce. CL and AI will play a major role in this new program.
    Better teaching materials (also on the web)
    Better sharing of teaching expertise
    Better integration of language and speech
    More teaching resources
    Better correspondence of degrees, internationally
    A decent textbook
    I would not put the stress on CL. I would rather put the stress on applications, namely IR, CLIR, MMI, automatic lexica construction, automatic thesaurus construction, automatic extraction of knowledge about the language.
    Possibility to pursue the programme abroad (France / Canada)
    More emphasis on programming practice
    Use of web-based courses developed by AcoHum members
    Introducing group projects involving computer work
    Making increased use of web technology
    More emphasis on hands on experience in other areas than statistical processing
    Moving towards more self-study/PBL/tutoring
    Use of machine-readable dictionaries (bi- and monolongual) corpora
    Generic graphics tools in Prolog (to draw trees and feature structures)
    Closer integration of computational linguistics and corpus linguistics
    Internet tools (java) for experimenting with formalisms and techniques
    Intergrated lectures and courses via WWW