After finishing my bachelor’s degree in Knowledge Engineering, I was not entirely satisfied with the field of study I had chosen. Although I wanted to continue in a technical domain, I felt it should be possible to combine computer science with some of my other interests. It was then that I discovered computational linguistics; I was immediately hooked on the idea of continuing my technical education and combining it with my love for languages. Soon after that, I chanced upon the EM LCT website and almost immediately decided to apply. I spent my first year at Charles University in Prague, where I took some courses on basic linguistics, combined with advanced courses in mathematics and computer science. The latter were very challenging, and I would not recommend choosing this partner if you lack a technical background. However, students with a strong technical background can learn a lot in Prague from some excellent professors at the top of their field. For my second year I headed over to the University of Lorraine in France. Having just come from Prague, the technical courses were a breeze, but I was able to learn a lot more about linguistics from experts in semantics and discourse. Furthermore, for second year students the University of Lorraine offers excellent opportunities to complete your master thesis at a research institution in town. After passing the Czech state exam in September 2014, I quickly found a job as a Technical Architecture Analyst with Accenture’s Video Analytics and Cognitive Computing team. The job is fast-paced, offers many opportunities for working internationally, and I am regularly able to use my knowledge in natural language processing for the various projects I work on within the company.

I began the EM-LCT program in 2009 at Saarland University, then went on to Nancy 2 University (now Lorraine University) for my second year. My master's thesis topic was in language modelling for machine translation, supervised by Martin Kay. Funded by the CITEC Graduate School at Bielefeld University, I went on to PhD work with David Schlangen from 2011-2015. My topic was on automatically resolving referring expressions to visually-present objects incrementally in the context of situated, interactive dialogue systems. My research has explored natural language understanding, resolving references to visually-present objects, interaction in dialogue, in-car dialogue systems, as well as semantic meaning. By the end of 2015 I will have started a post-doctoral work in the "KogniHome" project at Bielefeld University and the CITEC Graduate School.
September 2016 : now an assistant professor at Boise State University in the CS department.

I studied in the EM-LCT master program from 2007 to 2009 at the Free University of Bolzano, Italy and Saarland University, Germany. It was a difficult two years because of the pressure of the study, my lack of background in Natural Language Processing (NLP) / Computational Linguistics (CL),  and the adaptation to two new countries and completely different cultures. But those two years changed my life forever. During my M.Sc., I received a PhD scholarship offer from FBK-irst, a highly reputed research center, and University of Trento, Italy, one of the top Computer Science schools in Europe, who were aware of the quality of LCT graduates. After successfully defending my PhD in 2013, I received a job offer as a Post-Doctoral Researcher in the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center, USA, one of the foremost industrial research centers in the world. I worked here in the DeepQA Research Team with some of the best minds in Computer Science and NLP who built the famous Watson system that analyzes natural language questions and content well enough and fast enough to compete and win against champion players at Jeopardy! Now, I am working in IBM as a Senior Cognitive Software Engineer.

I got keen on linguistics when working as a translator of technical manuals at high school. It made me wonder how come this task cannot be handled by computers yet and that decided my professional trajectory. While studying computer science at the Charles  University in Prague, I got together with fellow students to organize a correspondence seminar in linguistics for high school students, which evolved into Czech Linguistics Olympiad (CLO) in 2011. At that time, I was already gladly a student of LCT, getting more  proper qualification for my linguistic hobby activities as well as for  my own  professional development. In 2012, CLO sent a national representation team to the international round (IOL) for the first time, and already the next year was a big success with almost 500  participants  nationwide  and three highest-grade awards at IOL. I stayed in the academia for one year after LCT, when I realized I wanted to work on real applications rather than research  software platforms. I have found my dream job as a developer of  NLP tools at Nuance, where I started late 2013. While I can now  draw on all educational experience I have, LCT has given me by far the most of what I need for my job. It is not only the technical knowledge but also  the broad overview of the field, presentational skills as well as relationship to other NLP professionals into whom I keep running on every corner in this small NLP world.

My time during the EMLCT programme was, despite all of the bumps, a long list of successes after successes. Since I've graduated, I've moved to a city I've wanted to live in for many years, back in my home country, making more than I had ever assumed I would make before I started the EMLCT, knowing enough about coding to get through the day and enjoy it. I learned enough to be a consultant occasionally for computational linguistics startups, and my coding skills that I developed continue to help me day to day with all of my personal and professional projects. I used a side project involving NLP to get into an incubator and experience my first start up. Academically, I successfully published many papers, both conferences - in the Netherlands, France (at EACL, no less!), Switzerland, Japan, Germany, the UK, and Spain. I published journal articles based on work done during my time in the EMLCT. I made hundreds of professional contacts who helped me figure out my particular interest in CoLi. I published my first book chapter, about the Semantic Web. Personally, I saw countries I hadn't thought I would, saw sights I never expected, sailed oceans and climbed mountains, metaphorical or not. I learned a language I never thought I'd have the patience to learn. I even learned what my limit is, and how to avoid it - a lesson I will dearly value for years to come. After my LCT, I moved to New York City, working for a startup. This was followed by a move to San Francisco, working for another startup there as the sole developer, and then getting a job as a subcontractor on a grant project with scientists at MIT. I am currently living in Boston, having just moved here after spending a few months traveling and working remotely in South East Asia.

I received the BSc from Nanjing University (China), Masters degrees from the University of Groningen (Netherlands) and Saarland University (Germany). I did my PhD at The Johns Hopkins University (USA). I have academic and industrial research experience at ICT/USC, City University of Hong Kong, ISI/USC, Vulcan, Motorola, Nokia Research and Google Research. I am an expert in language and speech technologies, with a focus on statistical question answering, parsing with semantic grammars, for both cloud-ready and embedded devices. I currently run KITT.AI.

In 2008, I got admitted in EMLCT program and I went on to study in University of Malta and Charles University in Prague. After completing Masters degree, I got a Ph.D. position in Charles University in Prague with major focus on Machine Translating languages that have significant word ordering differences and also have a rich target side morphology. Meanwhile, I also started working as a researcher in University of Amsterdam on one of a Domain Adaptation project. LCT gave me a platform to master my skills in the field of interest and pursue my career further. It gave me one of the greatest opportunity i.e. to travel abroad and see different cultures and meet people having different nationalities. This program was a life changing experience for me, life would have been very different if I hadn’t got this opportunity.

After having finished my Master's thesis on Stylometry, I started working for a company in Bristol (DigitalPebble) that I had already done an internship with during the previous summer.However, since I had really enjoyed the work on my thesis (and with my supervisors), I was reconsidering doing a P.hD. Around that time, a position at Trinity College Dublin came up, which by coincidence turned out to be exactly what I was looking for. I was subsequently offered that position and was able to start within 6 weeks of applying. My P.hD is funded by the Irish research centre CNGL (which has now evolved into ADAPT) they try to combine academia and industry, so we P.hD students can fully concentrate on doing our thesis rather than having to work on separate projects also. I was told afterwards that I was chosen particularly because of my final project, my strong CV and having worked with (and having been recommened by) exceptional researchers. In this, I feel my LCT experience has essentially contributed to all of these aspects obviously it's left to each individual to decide of how much work to put towards one's studies to achieve a certain goal -- however I see being given this unique opportunity to have brought me more than half way and I am very grateful to everyone involved in this. Work based on my Master's thesis was accepted to two different conferences, CLIN (Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands) and Digital Humanities 2014 (we were then also accepted to the DH Journal Issue 2015).

After graduating from the LCT program, I returned to my country where I enrolled in a computational linguistics PhD  program at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). As a PhD student, one my main interests are low resource languages, since my country has a vast linguistic diversity but almost no language technologies has been developed for these languages. My work focuses on automatic bilingual lexical extraction for a low-resource language pair of Mexico (Nahuatl-Spanish). The LCT program was an excellent opportunity for acquiring robust knowledge in the field of computational linguistics. It allowed me to apply this knowledge for tackling the particular challenges involved in the developing of language technologies in my country.

Achievements

• To our knowledge, we have created the first online parallel corpus for the language pair Nahuatl-Spanish.
• My PhD thesis proposal was selected in the Student Research Workshop, NAACL 2015.
• I have obtained travel grants by Google and the National Science Fundation (NSF) for attending international academic events during my PhD studies.

I received my Engineer degree of Information Technology at Hanoi University of Science and Technology (HUST), Vietnam in 2007. After graduation, I worked as a teaching assistant at HUST. In 2010, I was awarded the Erasmus Mundus scholarship to attend the Masters Program in Language and Communication Technologies at Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy and University of Lorraine, France. The program gave me a great opportunity to gain more knowledge and skills in really advanced academic environments, and to understand European culture. I am currently a PhD candidate in Computer Science at KU Leuven, Belgium.

The LCT master program gave me the opportunity to study computational linguistics at two universities in Europe, University of Nancy 2 (now University of Lorraine) in France and Free University of Bozen-Bolzano in Italy. After defending my thesis on the topic of distributional semantics, the experience and knowledge I gained during the program help me a lot in pursuing my PhD degree on the topic of information extraction, specifically event relation extraction, at University of Trento, Italy, with a scholarship from the FBK-irst research center. As part of my PhD I'm also involved in a European project called Newsreader. During the PhD study I received several travel grants from Google and ACL to attend a machine learning summer school (LxMLS 2013) and notable NLP conferences. My PhD proposal was presented at the ACL 2014 Student Research Workshop. Other than opening a door for me to pursue my studies outside my home country, the LCT program not only arms me with technical knowledge on computational linguistics, but also with some other important skills I would need to survive in the research world, namely identifying problems, problem solving, collaboration and presentation skills.

After obtaining my BSc from the University of Indonesia, I joined the LCT Master Program in 2010. I studied at the University of Trento and the Saarland University. I did a research internship about Italian Speech Recognition System at the Fondazione Bruno Kessler in summer 2011 and worked as a research assistant at the Deutsche Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz during my study in Saarbrücken. After my graduation in 2012, I found a job in a software company in Saarland, where I was able to deepen my knowledge and gain professional experience on software engineering for a few years. I now reside in Berlin and work for HERE Maps as a software engineer working on voice guidance. These opportunities have enabled me to widen my knowledge on language technologies, observe two different European cultures and learn the languages, expand my network and find my way towards my life goals.

I’ve always loved languages and still enjoy learning new ones, and already in my Computer Science first degree from Israel’s Technion I took a few language courses just for fun, and all available NLP courses that combined my two loves (or maybe put together my profession and hobby).
Then, after long years in programming I found LCT on the web, applied, got admitted, and spent the most exciting years of my life in Saarbrücken, Germany and Shanghai, China.
During my studies I learned much more than exciting NLP theories, but also acquired new friends, languages, presentation skills, self-confidence and inter-personal and inter-cultural awareness...and hopefully some skill there too.
Coming back to Israel, I’ve decided to develop those soft skills (lots to learn yet) and open my own (yet) small international  company, IMA POLANIA (Polish mom in Hebrew), where I offer clients from all across the world the opportunity to broaden their opportunities by getting an EU passport, to which they’re entitled by descent from European emigrants.
All my employees both Israeli and Polish and more freelancers from other countries live all over the world and work together through the internet from their own homes.
I take much pleasure and pride in managing my own time, offering flexible jobs to people (many of whom are stay-at-home moms) and offering my clients new horizons of better work and life and a way to learn about their family’s heritage.
I’m still thinking though how to combine NLP with my business, so my Jewish mother is truly happy.

After graduating from the EMLCT programme, I was able to apply for and immediately start with a dissertation at the Leibniz Wissenschaftscampus "Empirical Linguistics & Computational Language Modeling" (LiMo) at the University of Heidelberg. This research group aims to build annotated resources and processing models for the German Language. My task is to look at Sentiment Analysis as a use case for these datasets and models. More specifically, I look at a rather novel and challenging aspect of sentiment: the framing of entities to express a negative or positive opinion without the use of sentiment-bearing lexical items.
The LCT programme not only provided me with the contacts to this institute, but also with the ideal background for this work. I am satisfied with my work environment, my field of research, and with my opportunities for the future. For this reason, I would recommend a PhD after an LCT MA or MSc in particular for students with a linguistics background, provided that the topic and style of supervision align with their ambitions.

I studied at Saarland University and University of Lorraine, and finished my Master's thesis at Inria Nancy-Grand Est. During the first year, I also took courses and conducted research at Max Planck Institute for Informatics and DFKI. After graduation I went back to Shanghai and joined Tencent as a research engineer in artificial intelligence.
Personally I recommend the LCT program for its wide coverage of topics in language technology. Besides natural language processing and machine learning commonly seen in computer science programs, LCT also introduces you to computational linguistics, phonetics, speech technology, etc.
Also for me, living in the Saar-Lor-Lux euroregion for two years was definitely a great cultural experience. I witnessed everyday how a united Europe works across the borders. And I'm grateful that such arrangements were made possible under the Erasmus protocol.

My two partner universities were Saarland University and Trento University, thus Germany and Italy accordingly, so different countries, but similar to having brilliant opportunities for LCT students and very friendly academic people. First, in Saarbrücken you find one of the best computational linguistics and computer science centers in the world; second, in Trento, you find one of the best neuroscience centers as well as very strong computer science departments, especially having a large number of high-qualified groups in computational linguistics. From the start at both places you can easily jump into the world of real research working as a part of DFKI lab in Saarbrücken or a lab of DISI department in Trento, so by the end of the studies you have all opportunities to have a published scientific paper, which, obviously, is a very nice start of a professional carrier. Besides that, as LCT student you take part in annual EMLCT meetings, and always have a chance to take part in the NLP conferences around the globe while publishing the papers; additionally, you are constantly in the environment of new cultures, meeting students, which boosts your learning in the informal setting. After the studies, I started to work for a company as NLP software engineer, and, soon after that, due to the increasing amount of interesting tasks, got a chance to be involved in building an NLP team. I’m thankful for all the people at the administrative level of the program as well as to students who became my friends during the EMLCT journey.

I did my undergraduate studies in Computer Science and Philosophy in South Africa and then did an extended internship with Amazon, before starting the LCT programme. I have always loved visiting Europe and it was very exciting to be surrounded by people who also had a foot in each of the Science and Humanities fields. The LCT programme (Saarbruecken and Groningen for me) was a fantastic experience, and the knowledge I gained has been invaluable to me. It was also a great opportunity to build a wonderful network of friends and colleagues around Europe and the world! I started working part-time at an EdTech start-up (HyperionDev.com) while writing my thesis for LCT and took on a full-time role after I returned to South Africa. I now lead two teams of software developers here and work closely with the CEO in our mission to fix the world's growing tech skills gap through affordable online coding education. The LCT programme definitely gave me the hard and soft skills I needed to work with code and people day-to-day, and I would highly recommend it.

I got my Bachelors degree from Lomonosov Moscow State University (MSU) in 2016 and enrolled in the LCT program right after that. I spent my first year at Charles University in Prague and the second year at the University of Groningen. As a part of my studies, I also did an internship at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in summer 2017. I had a linguistics background and therefore I was trying to mostly concentrate on the computational aspects during my Masters. All three universities felt like a perfect choice for that. The fundamental education in the area of computer science that I received at Charles University in Prague made me feel very confident about my programming and analytical skills. The practically oriented courses at the University of Groningen helped me get my current job in software development / computational linguistics. The internship at Shanghai Jiao Tong University gave me the opportunity to get acquainted with the cutting edge research in the area of sentiment analysis. The experience I got within the LCT program is without any doubt unique and I highly recommend it to everyone interested in computational linguistics and NLP.
-December, 2018-

After graduating in Computer Science from Boise State University in 2017, I promptly jumped into the EM LCT program, studying first at Charles University and then at Saarland University. The program gave me fantastic opportunities to explore Europe with friendly faces and collaborate with faculty on compelling NLP research. During my time, I worked with professors at UFAL and DFKI on multilingual morphology and syntax modeling, publishing papers to EMNLP 2018 and 2019. LCT was a lifechanging experience which improved my research abilities and my outlook on enjoying moments with others, an experience that I would not exchange for any other. After completion, I joined Google AI as part of their Residency program to collaborate on more exciting machine learning research. September 2019

I received my BA in Neurolinguistics and Psycholinguistics from the University of Buenos Aires in 2015. I then began the LCT programme in 2016. I did my first year at the University of Trento, which is a unique hub for NLP and cognitive neuroscience, and did my second year at the University of Groningen where I dove deeper into machine learning. My thesis combined NLP and fMRI research. I am now a PhD student in the Harvard - MIT Speech and Hearing Bioscience and Technology program. I am currently working on detecting mental health symptoms from speech and language using machine learning. Beyond obtaining much needed skills, LCT gave me the opportunity of living in incredibly beautiful cities and learning from amazing mentors and students. I'm super thankful and highly recommend it. April, 2020

I was interested in going for a more technical oriented field after graduating in Linguistics from India and working on the speech domain for some time. I got the opportunity to join the LCT program in 2017. I did my first year at the University of the Basque County, Spain, and second year at the University of Lorraine, France. It was during the second-year at Lorraine, my computational skills got advanced with various projects. And, as part of the curriculum of Lorraine, I worked as an intern at the Multispeech team of Inria-Loria labs for my master thesis in my final semester. During my internship, I was offered a Ph.D. position in the same team where I am currently working on Speaker Identification. During the LCT program, I received grants to attend two summer schools on Deep Learning for Speech Processing in Poland and Speech Processing courses in Greece for which I am really thankful to the local coordinators of my host universities as well as the consortium.  It was a great experience both from the educational point of view as well as a social point of view.  April, 2020

I started my LCT journey after graduating with a BA in Computational Linguistics. At that time, I fully realized my passion for NLP and wanted to deepen my knowledge of Computer Science to better tackle real-life NLP problems. My first year at Charles University in Prague and second year at the University of Basque Country fully equipped me with all necessary technical and soft skills for my endeavours and definitely helped me to reach a new level of competence in NLP and Speech Processing. As my master thesis, I had a chance to work with Sony Europe in the domain of Automated Speech Recognition. Now, I am working in the industry doing research and development in the field of Sentiment Analysis. I am genuinely thankful for this experience, acquired knowledge and incredible LCT people! May 2020

Dr. Mehwish Alam is a Post-Doctoral Researcher/Senior Researcher at FIZ Karlsruhe – Leibniz Institute for Information Infrastructure and Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Institute of Applied Informatics and Formal Description Methods (AIFB) with Prof. Dr. Harald Sack. Before that she has conducted her Post-Doctoral Research at Laboratoire d’Informatique de Paris-Nord (LIPN), Paris, France (2016-2017) and Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (CNR), Rome, Italy (2017-2019) with Prof. Dr. Aldo Gangemi. The focus of her research is to apply or develop Data Mining, Machine Learning/Deep Learning techniques for Semantic Web and Text Processing. Before her Post-Doc, she was PhD student in the field of Computer Science (2011-2015) in LORIA, INRIA, Nancy Grand-Est, France. Her PhD thesis was supervised by Dr. Amedeo Napoli and Dr. Malika-Smail Tabbone. She completed her prestigious Erasmus Mundus Research Masters in Language Communication and Technology in the discipline of Natural Language Processing. She completed her Masters in collaboration with University of Groningen, Groningen, the Netherlands and University of Nancy 2, Nancy, France.
July, 2020

Feraena Bibyna,
I got interested in Computational Linguistics and NLP while I was doing my bachelor degree in Computer Science in the University of Indonesia. I got to know about EM LCT from a friend that has been accepted, so I applied and got accepted in 2013. I did my first year in Saarland University and my second year in Charles University in Prague. While finishing my thesis in Prague, I got a job offer from the IBM Watson Lab in Prague and worked there as a Research Scientist until 2017. I am currently residing in Tokyo, working as a Computational Linguist in Google. The EM LCT program allowed me to gain more skill in both linguistics and computer science and opened a lot of doors for me in the Computational Linguistic field. Not only that, I was also able to meet a lot of like-minded people, and some of them have become close friends!
October, 2021