Human Language Technology (HLT) is a developing interdisciplinary field encompassing most subdisciplines of linguistics and computational linguistics, natural language processing, computer science, artificial intelligence, psychology, philosophy, mathematics, and statistics.<br>Anywhere language meets information technology or where humans need to interact with computers, language needs to be organized so that it can be handled and processed by computational means. This often requires broad knowledge about linguistics and how languages work and computer science and related fields.<br>Well-known topics in human language technology include web search engine technology (an instance of information retrieval), speech recognition (computer dictation), speech synthesis (computer-generated speech), optical character recognition (OCR), machine translation, electronic dictionaries, spell checking, grammar checking, word processing, computer typesetting, computer-assisted language teaching, automatic captioning on TV - in short, any and all tasks where human language and information technology meet.<br>At the University of Arizona, our objective is to provide a balanced curriculum in linguistics, computational linguistics, and practical skills like business training. Upon completion of the program, students will have the skills required to enter a competitive workforce. We also work closely with providers of internship opportunities in the industry to assure that students receive strong hands-on experience in the form of a final project, preferably done in the industry. The minimum number of credits to be completed is 36, and students will also write a master's thesis documenting an actual completed implementation. Possible local industrial internship opportunities include Lockheed Martin (Phoenix), Intel (Chandler), Raytheon (Tucson), and Motorola (Phoenix).