Linguistics at UCL

FIAL

UCL currently ranks among the 100 best universities in the world for this discipline (QS Rankings, 2013). Three research centres specialize in the field of corpus linguistics (CECL), natural language processing (CENTAL), and spoken French and discursive studies (VALIBEL). Students will work in close contact with researchers at these three centres.

The Centre for English Corpus Linguistics (CECL) specializes in the collection and use of corpora for linguistic and pedagogical purposes. Its main areas of focus are learner and multilingual corpora. CECL has always sought to link theoretical concepts, whether from cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics or contrastive linguistics, to their teaching applications. Its research therefore has the dual goal of providing a solid empirical basis for language acquisition and contrastive studies and grounding applied research in a robust theoretical framework.

CENTAL is a centre specializing in the study of natural language processing, a discipline that has come to public attention via successful commercial applications such as spellchecking, speech recognition, machine translation, information retrieval, etc. As a university centre, CENTAL is able to offer its expertise in automatic text processing.

The Valibel Research Centre has established one of the most important textual databases currently in existence for spoken French. Based on analysis of oral and written data taken from its actual production context, the Centre’s research primarily focuses on discourse analysis, lexicology, sociolinguistics and prosody, with the emphasis on variations in language usage.