Human Language Technology
Master of Science
Quick Facts
Top 1%
of all Higher-Ed
Institutions
- Center for World University Rankings, 2024
#1
In Best Value Among
Arizona's Public Universities
- Payscale, 2024
As language-based artificial intelligence reshapes how people search, communicate, and build technology, Arizona Online’s Master of Science in Human Language Technology prepares students to work at the intersection of language, data, and computation. The program focuses on natural language processing – language-based AI – through a balanced, practical curriculum that integrates linguistics, computational linguistics, and machine learning. Coursework covers natural language processing, speech technologies, translation, text analytics, and the use of large language models within modern language systems.
With strong and growing demand for professionals who can design, evaluate, and deploy language technologies, graduates are prepared for high-impact roles across technology, defense, healthcare, education, and government. Real-world experience is central to the program through an applied internship or project, where students tackle authentic NLP challenges and gain hands-on experience in applied research or industry settings.
The program is delivered fully online and designed to support a range of learning needs and professional schedules. An interdisciplinary focus welcomes students from diverse academic or professional backgrounds including teaching, linguistics, and language-focused fields – who are ready to build technical skills using Python and data-driven methods. Career-oriented by design, the program equips graduates with the skills to bridge human language expertise with computational systems in today’s evolving workforce.
Eligibility: An undergraduate major in linguistics or computer science is not required, but applicants should have some programming experience, preferably Python, and some understanding of language.
*Residents of some U.S. Territories may not be eligible. Please see our Eligibility & State Authorization page for more information.
The curriculum for this program includes:
Receive an introduction to human language technology (HLT). Content includes a combination of theoretical and applied topics including tokenization across languages, n-grams, word representations, basic probability theory, introductory programming and version control.
Get a hands-on introduction to text classification, word embeddings, sequence labeling, parsing and an examination of analogical reasoning using word embeddings.
Explore the fundamentals of formal language theory, syntactic and semantic processing and the place of world knowledge in natural language processing.
Outcomes
Skills
Earning your Master of Science in Human Language Technology will build core skills, including:
- Computational Linguistics statistical & symbolic methods
- Natural Language Processing
- Neural Network-based models
- Speech Technology
- Text Retrieval & information extraction
Potential Career Paths
Graduates of the Human Language Technology program will be prepared to pursue the following career fields:
Student Quote
“My program gave me so many fundamentals for statistics and linguistic program design, which are essential to understanding the behind-the-scenes operation of the tools I’m using… People coming out of the HLT program have the opportunity to be highly valuable citizens of the world — to help society navigate through the rapid changes that are happening now and coming.” – Trevor Sullivan, a 2017 HLT alum and senior artificial intelligence conversational engineer with a large financial services company.
