Why study Language and Communication Technologies in Nijmegen?

Automated language and speech systems have become an integral part of modern life. Q&A's on company and government websites frequently rely on chatbots and are often the first point of contact with a company or organisation. Large language models, such as ChatGPT, have become a common way of generating ideas and concrete texts and, as a tool, have a function similar to that of a grammar checker. At the same time, automatic speech recognition technologies have advanced tremendously, supporting applications such as voice assistants, dictation software, and automatic transcription of meetings and lectures.

However, the rise of automated systems is not without its problems. Apart from the ethical issues regarding plagiarism and the substantial energy required for generating automatic text (and, more broadly, for operating AI systems), there is the ongoing concern about the reliability of the answers that ChatGPT, for example, gives to your question, or “prompt”. A more concrete problem is the linguistic output of automated systems, which often leaves much to be desired. Chatbots frequently use sub-optimal scripts which can lead to unnatural or poor client communication and sometimes fail to develop into meaningful communication. We are placing ever higher demands on linguistic and communicative properties, and improving them requires more and more of our knowledge.

All these issues are addressed in this Master’s programme, but the focus is clearly on the latter aspect: improving the linguistic and communicative properties of automatic language and speech systems. Large language models like ChatGPT are trained with a huge amount of linguistic data, but usually do not make use of detailed linguistic analysis. The Faculty of Arts at Radboud University, and more specifically the Centre for Language Studies employs both experts in automatic language and speech systems, linguistics and communication. This makes it possible to offer a programme in which these fields come together at a high level. Through these experts and our elaborate alumni system, we stay in close contact with the professional field, keeping us informed about the specific skills required by the field and the developments within the field. These are connected to a solid theoretical background, resulting in a well-balanced programme.