The UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training in Natural Language Processing is jointly run by the School of Informatics and the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences and is funded by UK Research & Innovation. It started in 2019 and will comprise 5 cohorts of c. 12-15 students per cohort.

Its aim is to equip students with the fundamental skills for advanced research in NLP and language science, giving them foundations in: linguistics, machine learning, statistics, algorithms, programming, working with other modalities such as vision and design, ethics, and responsible innovation as they apply to NLP systems.

A four-year integrated training programme, it will give students a solid foundation in the challenge of working with language in a computational setting and its relevance to critical engineering, scientific and ethical problems in our modern world. It also offers training in the key software engineering and machine learning skills necessary to solve these problems. The programme aims to have a transformative effect as we train, and on the field as a whole, by developing future leaders and producing cutting-edge research in both methodology and applications.

The CDT brings together researchers in NLP, speech, linguistics, cognitive science, and design informatics from across the University of Edinburgh. Students are supervised from a pool of over 60 members of faculty and benefit from cutting edge computing and experimental facilities.