Proceedings of the Second ACL Workshop on Effective Tools and Methodologies for Teaching NLP and CL, pages 43–48,
Ann Arbor, June 2005. c©2005 Association for Computational Linguistics
Language Technology from a European Perspective 
 
 
Hans Uszkoreit, 
Valia Kordoni 
Vladislav Kubon Michael Rosner Sabine Kirchmeyer-
Andersen 
Dept. of Computational 
Linguistics 
UFAL MFF UK Dept. of Computer Sci-
ence and A.I. 
Dept. of Computational 
Linguistics 
Saarland University Charles University University of Malta Copenhagen Business 
School 
D-66041, Saarbruecken, 
Germany 
Prague, Czech Republic Msida, Malta Copenhagen, Denmark 
{uszkoreit, 
kordoni}@coli.uni-
sb.de 
vk@ufal.mff.cuni.cz mike.rosner 
@um.edu.mt 
ska.id@cbs.dk 
 
 
 
 
Abstract 
This paper describes the cooperation of 
four European Universities aiming at at-
tracting more students to European master 
studies in Language and Communication 
Technologies. The cooperation has been 
formally approved within the framework 
of the new European program “Erasmus 
Mundus” as a Specific Support Action in 
2004. The consortium also aims at creat-
ing a sound basis for a joint master pro-
gram in the field of language technology 
and computer science. 
1 European higher education: Erasmus 
Mundus 
The Erasmus Mundus programme [1] is a co-
operation and mobility program in the field of 
higher education. It aims to enhance quality in 
European higher education and to promote inter-
cultural understanding through co-operation with 
non-EU countries. 
The program is intended to strengthen European 
co-operation and international links in higher edu-
cation by supporting high-quality European Mas-
ters Courses, by enabling students and visiting 
scholars from around the world to engage in post-
graduate study at European universities, as well as 
by encouraging the outgoing mobility of European 
students and scholars towards non-EU countries. 
The Erasmus Mundus program comprises four 
concrete actions: 
 
ACTION 1 - Erasmus Mundus Masters Courses: 
high-quality integrated courses at masters level 
offered by a consortium of at least three universi-
ties in at least three different European countries.  
 
ACTION 2 - Erasmus Mundus scholarships: a 
scholarship scheme for non-EU-country graduate 
students and scholars from the whole world. 
 
ACTION 3 - Partnerships: Erasmus Mundus Mas-
ters Courses selected under Action 1 also have the 
possibility of establishing partnerships with non-
EU-country higher education institutions.  
 
ACTION 4 - Enhancing attractiveness: projects 
aimed at enhancing the attractiveness of the Euro-
pean higher education.  
2 LATER 
One of the projects approved for funding (and the 
only one in the field of language technology) in the 
2004 call is called LATER – Language Technol-
ogy Erasmus Mundus [2]. 
LATER falls under action 4 of the program and 
hence addresses the need to enhance the attractive-
ness of European higher education in Language 
43
Technology and Communication (LCT). This need 
will be met through dissemination of the combined 
LCT-related expertise in of a consortium of Uni-
versities whose members are as follows 
 
Saarland University in Saarbruecken (CoLi) 
The Department of Computational Linguistics 
and Phonetics (CoLi) of Saarland University (co-
ordinator) has an excellent international reputation 
for graduate training in Language Technologies, 
and for leading-edge basic research in this area. 
CoLi offers a new M.Sc. program in Language 
Science and Technology [3]. This is an active pro-
gram of basic, applied and cognitive research, 
which combines with state-of-the-art facilities to 
provide students with a rich and stimulating envi-
ronment for their research. Moreover, CoLi offers 
a European Ph.D. program in Language Technol-
ogy and Cognitive Systems. In the past 15 years, 
CoLi has provided postgraduate research training 
to 100 early-stage researchers [4]. 
 
Charles University, Prague (ÚFAL) 
The Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics 
(ÚFAL) at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics 
of the Charles University in Prague offers a five-
year master program in Computer Science with 
several specialized branches. One of the branches 
of this program is the masters in Computational 
and Formal Linguistics [7]. It focuses mainly on 
the following four topics: formal description of 
natural language, grammars and automata in lin-
guistics, methods of artificial intelligence in lin-
guistics, as well as methods of automatic natural 
language processing.  
 
University of Malta (UoM) 
The Department of Computer Science and Arti-
ficial Intelligence at the University of Malta, estab-
lished in 1993, teaches both Bachelors and Masters 
degree programs. The 4-year BSc. (Hons) scheme 
include several streams relevant to Language 
Technology including NLP and Computational 
Linguistics itself, Information Retrieval, Semantic 
Web, Internet and Agent technologies. The De-
partment also runs a, one-year research oriented 
M.Sc. program [10]. The areas of specialization 
include the development of computational tools, 
techniques and resources for Maltese, the only se-
mitic language to enjoy official EU status.  
 
Copenhagen Business School (CBS) 
The Department of Computational Linguistics 
is part of the Faculty of Modern Languages at the 
Copenhagen Business School. The Department is 
actively involved in research in the following four 
core fields: formal descriptions of the Danish lan-
guage, modeling of knowledge relevant for LSP, 
LSP databases, and Machine Translation. Embed-
ded in this context is the Master of Language Ad-
ministration (MLA) [9] that the Department of 
Computational Linguistics of the Copenhagen 
Business School offers in co-operation with the 
University of Southern Denmark in Roskilde  
3 Overall aims of the project 
The overall aim of the project is to export the 
common educational experience currently embod-
ied within existing Masters programs of the con-
sortium to scholars and students of non-EU 
countries. 
This aim will be realized by several different 
classes of activity under the rubrics of (i) work-
shops (ii) distance learning tools and (iii) coordina-
tion of a common Master program. We discuss 
these in the following sections. 
3.1 Workshops 
One of the most important types of activities of 
the project is organizing workshops and courses 
both for students from non-EU countries and for 
their teachers. The effect of these events is at least 
twofold – the students from countries or regions 
which do not have an access to any higher degree 
education in LCT get a chance to broaden their 
perspective by listening to lectures of prominent 
scientists and lecturers. The courses will also help 
the consortium to establish better contacts with 
non-EU Universities, teachers, and students which 
will turn out to be invaluable when disseminating 
the common European Master program in Lan-
guage Technology discussed further below. 
Both ÚFAL and CoLi have a long tradition in 
respect of offering such courses to students from 
the broadest possible range of countries. 
ÚFAL has devoted a huge effort in the past to 
raise funding for the organization, once or twice a 
year, of a series of lectures by prominent scientists 
and lecturers from all over the world. This series of 
lectures, the Vilem Mathesius courses [6], have 
become well-known, especially among the Central 
44
and East European students of computational and 
general linguistics.  
This year’s course, held in March under the aus-
pices of LATER, was able to support  the atten-
dance of 50 students from Russia, Ukraine, 
Albania, Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia and Georgia to 
lectures by prominent individuals including two 
ACL award winners. 
At CoLi, the Computational Linguistics Collo-
quium is also a traditional event attracting the at-
tention of both well-known lecturers and a number 
of master and postgraduate students from various 
countries. A second series of lectures in the frame 
of our project was held at the University of Saar-
landes in Saarbruecken in January. 
A third event, organized by the CBS, will take 
place in June. The first day consists of information 
seminar on content management and language 
technology to promote CBS’ newly-launched In-
ternational Master of Language Administration, 
whilst the second will be devoted to diffusion of a 
various issues connected to the Erasmus Mundus 
course.  
Finally, a fourth event, in the form of a work-
shop with invited guest lecturers, is being organ-
ized at the University of Malta that will take place 
in September 2005. The theme of the workshop 
will be Machine Translation which is currently 
very topical given the newly-achieved official 
European status that the local language now enjoys.  
3.2 Coordination of Masters Programs 
A second important aim of the LATER project 
is the definition, coordination and implementation 
of an integrated European Masters Programme in 
LCT by creating a common basis that will appeal 
to both European and non-EU students. 
The rationale behind the creation of such a pro-
gramme is the assumption that LCT now occupies 
a central position in research and education in 
Europe, being a key enabling technology for nu-
merous applications related to the information so-
ciety, although the shortage of qualified 
researchers and developers is slowing down the 
speed of innovation in Europe. 
The proposed programme addresses this short-
age by creating a directed education and training 
opportunity for the next generation of LCT innova-
tors in that will in turn bring educational, social 
and economic benefits. Some specific aims of 
Erasmus Mundus are also addressed: European 
education in LCT will be promoted worldwide and 
its competitiveness increased, increasing at the 
same time the competitiveness of European IT in-
dustries, creating a multilingual information soci-
ety that is accessible for all, and turning the 
``information overload'' into a wealth of accessible 
and useful knowledge. 
3.3 Distance learning tools 
A third aim of LATER is the development of 
effective methods of hosting and integrating non-
EU students, for example by developing distance 
learning tools and joint distance education modules, 
in order to facilitate outreach by online dissemina-
tion of courses. An example of such modules, as 
well as for computer-based tools, is being devel-
oped on the basis of the virtual courses CoLi has 
developed in the last 3 years in the framework of 
the MiLCA project (Medienintensive Lehrmodule 
in der Computerlinguistik-Ausbildung
1
). 
We also plan to explore the use of collaboration 
technologies based on Sitescape [16], that have 
been developed at CBS for academic collaboration, 
for the management of certain aspects of the pro-
posed Masters programme.
The fruits of various initiatives already under 
way at UoM will be exploited and extended during 
the life of the proposed course. These include in-
teractive web based course delivery [13], just-in-
time support based on P2P architectures [14], 
XML-based frameworks for online courses [15], 
the latter being developed within as a part of the 
Mediterranean Virtual University (MVU) 
EUMEDIS project [17]. 
 
4 Integrated European LCT Masters 
Programme 
Whilst many agree with the above assessment of 
the importance of LCT, they disagree on the defi-
nition of “integrated course”. Fortunately, we can 
turn to the comprehensive definition supplied by 
the EU call, the central element of which is “a 
jointly developed curriculum or full recognition by 
the consortium of modules which are developed 
                                                           
1
 for more see http://milca.sfs.uni-
tuebingen.de/index.html. 
45
and delivered separately, but make up a common 
standard Masters course.” 
Again, some turn away in horror at the notion of 
a standard curriculum in this area, the claim being 
that there is already enough standardization in the 
world, so why add to it? The point is, any pro-
gramme dealing with LCT has to address the fact 
that it is highly interdisciplinary, including, at the 
core, computer science, computational and theo-
retical linguistics, and mathematics, and at the pe-
riphery, a wide variety of other subjects including 
electrical engineering, psychology, cognitive sci-
ence artificial intelligence etc.  
With such a large number of disciplines in-
volved, it is practically impossible for a single 
University to excel in all of them. However if more 
than one University is involved, various kinds of 
curriculum sharing can be envisaged and so a 
much higher level of coverage becomes entirely 
achievable.  
Put another way, curriculum sharing, together 
with common admission and assessment proce-
dures envisaged, allows delivery of a complex 
course to be handled by what is effectively a “su-
peruniversity”. 
4.1 Integration in practice 
To put this idea into practice we are proposing 
that students will get the chance to attend a two 
years’ master program at two universities chosen 
from a larger consortium, which is currently being 
put together. It includes the four original partners 
of the LATER project and the following new part-
ners: University of Amsterdam (UvA) in the Neth-
erlands, Free University of Bolzano-Bozen (FUB) 
in Italy, the Universities of Nancy 1 and Nancy 2 
in France, Roskilde University in Denmark and 
Utrecht University in the Netherlands. 
Studying in multi-national groups at two uni-
versities in Europe, with English as instruction 
language, accompanied by language classes in an-
other European language, will contribute to the 
students' preparation for the increasing globaliza-
tion of science, commerce and industry. The 
course also will also prepare students for follow-up 
Ph.D. studies provided by the participating partners 
and others. 
The proposed programme follows the Bologna 
model for higher education in Europe and com-
prises 120 ECTS
2
 credits, 30 of which make up the 
Masters dissertation, and 90 of which are course-
work credits structured as follows: 
• Compulsory modules in Computer Science (28 
ECTS) 
• Compulsory modules in Language Technology 
(28 ECTS) 
• Advanced modules in Language Technology, 
Computational Linguistics and Computer Sci-
ence (34 ECTS) 
Coursework is distributed over three semesters, 
while the dissertation is supposed to be completed 
in the fourth semester  
It is important to underline that this structure 
permits a considerable degree of variation. First, a 
module might be “implemented” by different set of 
courses at different Universities. Secondly, the ad-
vanced modules are electives, based on the specific 
strengths in research and teaching of individual 
partner institutions. There is no requirement that 
the advanced modules offered by different Univer-
sities should coincide. 
Let us now introduce individual modules in 
more detail. Parentheses indicate ECTS credits. 
Computer Science Modules 
The Computer Science Modules are as follows:  
 
• Logic, Computability and Complexity (≥ 9) 
Topics: Logic & inference; Computability the-
ory; Complexity theory; Discrete mathematics 
• Formal Languages and Algorithms (≥ 9) 
Topics: Formal grammars and languages hier-
archy; Parsing and compiler design; Search 
techniques and constraint resolution; Auto-
mated Learning 
• Data Structures, Data Organization and 
Processing (≥ 6) 
Topics: Algebraic data types; Relational data-
bases; Semi-structured data and XML; Informa-
tion retrieval; Digital libraries 
• Advanced Modules and Applications(≥ 6) 
Topics: Artificial Intelligence, Knowledge 
Ŕ epresentation, Automated Reasoning, 
Semantic Web, Neural Networks, Machine 
Learning etc. Students are expected to obtain at 
least 9 ECTS credits from each of the first two 
                                                           
2
 European Credit Transfer System: a standard measure that is 
used in Europe for comparing the size of courses. 
46
modules and 6 ECTS credits from each of the 
remaining two modules.  
Language Technology Modules 
The Language Technology Modules are these: 
• Foundations of Language Technology (≥ 6) 
Topics: Statistical methods; Symbolic methods; 
Cognition; Corpus Linguistics; Text and 
speech; Foundations of Linguistics 
• Computational Syntax and Morphology (≥ 9) 
Topics: Finite state methods; Probabilistic ap-
proaches; Formal grammars; Tagging; Chunk-
ing; Parsing 
• Computational Semantics, Pragmatics and 
Discourse (≥ 6) 
Topics: Syntax-semantics interface; Semantic 
construction; Dialogue; Formal semantics 
• Advanced Modules and Applications 
(≥ 6) Topics: Machine Translation, Informa-
tion Retrieval, Speech Recognition, Question 
Answering, Psycholinguistics etc.. 
4.2 Main issues to be addressed  
Although it was not explicitly mentioned in the 
previous text, the integration of existing master 
programmes is done exclusively pair-wise. The 
students can’t study at three universities (although 
the rules of the Erasmus Mundus programme allow 
such triangular cooperation). The restrictions 
within our consortia go even further – the students 
do not have a free choice of a combination of any 
two universities from within the consortium, they 
must choose one of the pairs offered by the consor-
tium. 
The reason for such a restriction is pretty simple 
- it turned out that although all members of the 
consortia in principle provide education both in 
Computer Science and in Computational Linguis-
tics, they differ in the balance between these two 
fields. Within the consortium, there are universities 
with a strong stress on a Computer Science courses, 
aiming at a complex education including the sound 
theoretical background in the field, while other 
universities offer a more practically oriented edu-
cational scheme, stressing the concepts attracting a 
wider audience, e.g. various types of web tech-
nologies, databases, data mining etc.  
As a result of this, each university participates in 
an average of four bilateral partnerships. We think 
that the fact that the consortium consists of univer-
sities which are not identical greatly increases the 
variety of options available. They have a chance to 
choose those universities which are best suited to 
their preferences whether these are in terms of sub-
ject area emphasis or geographical region.  
The preparation of the integrated Master pro-
gramme doesn’t stop at matching the universities 
and lectures offered. Erasmus Mundus is not just a 
cooperation, it is really a completely new scheme 
which must also address practical issues as grades, 
examination procedures, admission procedure, tui-
tion fees, defense of the thesis, local specialties 
existing at some partner universities etc.
The proposed Masters programme is something 
new. It is the first attempt to create a comprehen-
sive Masters degree in this subject area that con-
forms to all the legalistic requirements of each 
participating University. Students completing the 
course will possess a Masters degree delivered by 
two of the participant Universities. This is in con-
trast to the existing European Master in Language 
and Speech [11], which is implemented through a 
certification procedure that does not replace any 
legal degree that a student may obtain from a Uni-
versity.
 
5 Conclusion 
Although the process of establishing a new Euro-
pean Master programme in Language Technology 
was really very complicated, time consuming and 
painful, there are definitely already at this stage 
very positive results. 
In order to submit a proposal, our consortium 
has managed to overcome all formal and structural 
differences among all partners, it has found a rea-
sonable model of cooperation, it has developed a 
high-quality master programme open both to Euro-
pean and non-EU students. 
The wide variety of modules and topics offered 
combined with a relatively high degree of freedom 
of choice for students allows for individual pairs of 
partner universities to promote those courses and 
fields in which they excel. The students are of 
course offered individual guidance from consor-
tium members in order to allow them to identify 
that pair of universities which best suits their indi-
vidual needs and preferences 
47
The strategy we have chosen – the initial coop-
eration of a smaller consortium in the LATER pro-
ject, promoting LTC education among the students 
from outside the EU and testing our ability both to 
offer a coordinated high-quality education and to 
attract a reasonable amount of interested students, 
has turned to be a sound one. It also helped to 
solve some issues in the larger consortium based 
on the experience from the smaller one. 

References  
[1] http://europa.eu.int/comm/education
/programmes/mundus/index_en.html 
(Erasmus Mundus web page) 
[2] http://europa.eu.int/comm/education
/programmes/mundus/projects/2004/47
.pdf (The description of the LATER pro-
ject) 
[3] http://www.coli.uni-
saarland.de/msc/ (the MSc website at 
the University of Saarlandes in Saar-
bruecken) 
[4] http://www.coli.uni-
saarland.de/kvv/ (courses at the Dept. 
of Computational Linguistics at the Uni-
versity of Saarlandes in Saarbruecken) 
[5] http://www.coli.uni-
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page of the Language Technology II 
course in Saarbruecken) 
[6] http://ufal.mff.cuni.cz/vmc/vmc_ls2
0.html (the web page of the Vilem 
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[7] http://www.mff.cuni.cz/toUTF8.en/st
udium/bcmgr/ok/i1b53.htm (the master 
programme in Mathematical Linguistics at 
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[8] http://web.cbs.dk/stud_pro/clmdatau
k.shtml (the master program at the Co-
penhagen Business School) 
[9] http://uk.cbs.dk/mla (Master of Lan-
guage Administration at the Copenhagen 
Business School) 
[10] http://www.cs.um.edu.mt/rese
arch/pgEnquiries.html (the master 
program at the University of Malta) 
[11] http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/e
uromasters (European Masters in 
Language and Speech) 
[12] A.Burchardt, S. Walter and M. 
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351-356. 
[13] Ellul, C., 2002, “Just-in-Time Lec-
ture Delivery, Management and Student 
Support System”, BSc. Project report, 
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[14] Bezzina, R., 2002, “Peer-to-Peer 
Just-in-Time Support for Curriculum based 
Learning”, BSc. Project report, Dept. 
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[15] Cachia, E., and Micallef, M., forth-
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[16] www.sitescape.com : SiteScape 
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[17] http://www.eumedis.net/en/project/
22: Mediterranean Virtual University 
(MVU) description. 
