Carnegie Mellon University
School of Computer Science  ›  Language Technologies Institute  ›  Academics  ›  phd-mlt  ›  Ph.D. and MLT Course Categories

Ph.D. and MLT Course Categories

The Ph.D. and MLT programs organize courses into several different categories. This page explains the courses in each category and provides category-related information.

The course lists below include courses from outside of SCS that count as SCS courses for satisfying degree requirements. Further information about these courses is available on the web pages of the departments that offer them.

Depending on a student's interests, electives may be taken from the LTI, other departments in the School of Computer Science, or other departments at Carnegie Mellon or the University of Pittsburgh. Students interested in speech should consider speech-oriented electives; other areas of interest include linguistics, statistics, and human-computer interaction (HCI).

Course Definitions

Undergraduate courses have numbers below xx-600. Senior-level undergraduate courses (xx-4xx and xx-5xx) count for MLT graduation credit, but not PhD graduation credit.
Graduate courses have numbers of xx-600 and above.

An "LTI course" is any 12-unit course with a number of 11-XXX; a 6-unit course with 11-XXX counts as one-half of an LTI course. Unless otherwise specified, "course" means an actual classroom course, not credit given for research or independent study.

The LTI allows any one MLD (10-XXX) graduate course to count as an "LTI course"

An “SCS course” is any 12-unit course with a course number indicating a unit of the School of Computer Science (including LTI); a 6-unit course with such a number counts as one-half of an SCS course. Unless otherwise specified, "course" means an actual classroom course, not credit given for research or independent study. 

Any course that satisfies a Breadth requirement can be counted as an "SCS course".

The courses listed below can also be counted as an "SCS course".

Course Title Units Semester
18-691 Digital Signal Processing 12 Spring
80-816 Causality and Machine Learning 12 Varies

There are several types of independent studies, as shown below.

Course Title Units Semester
11-910

Directed Research
Your primary research topic

 1-48 Both
11-920

Independent Study

 6-18 Both
11-920

Independent Study: Breadth
Not in your main area of research

 6-18 Discontinued
11-925

Independent Study: Area of Concentration
In your main area of research, but not your primary topic

 6-36 Discontinued
11-929 Masters Thesis 6-18 Both
11-930

Dissertation Research
Ph.D. student research after the thesis proposal is accepted

 5-36 Both

Note that the Independent Study courses listed above do not normally count for LTI class credit. The exception is if an Independent Study is used to replace an unavailable LTI course (with prior permission of the chair of the LTI graduate programs).

Masters students: Note that only 12 units of "Independent Study: Project" may normally count towards your total course requirements.

 

The following courses satisfy lab course requirements for MLT students and PhD students that entered before Fall 2025.

Course Title Units Semester
11-711 Advanced Natural Language Processing 12 Spring
11-712 Lab in Natural Language Processing (Self-Paced) 6 Fall/Spring
11-723 Linguistics Lab (Self-Paced) 6 Fall/Spring
11-726 Meaning in Language lab (Self-Paced) 6 Fall/Spring
11-727 Computational Semantics for NLP 12 Varies
11-742 Self-Paced Lab: IR 6 Upon request
11-754

Project Course: Dialogue Systems /
Project Course: Conversational Systems

 6 Spring
11-767 On-Device Machine Learning 12 Fall
11-775 Large-Scale Multimedia Analysis 12 Fall/Spring
11-777 Multimodal Machine Learning 12 Fall/Spring
11-785 Introduction to Deep Learning 12 Fall/Spring
11-796 Question Answering Lab 6 Fall/Spring
11-797 Question Answering 12 Spring
11-801 Quantitative Evaluation of Language Technologies 12 Fall
11-830

Computational Ethics in Natural Language Processing /
Ethics, Social Biases, and Positive Impact in Language Technologies

 12 Spring
11-831

Computational Ethics Lab (Self-Paced)

 6 Fall
11-866

Artificial Social Intelligence (Lab if 12 hours)

 6/12 Discontinued
11-877

Advanced Topics in Multimodal Machine Learning (Lab if 12 hours)

 6/12 Spring

Focus Areas

Under CMU's "grandfather policy", MLT and Ph.D. students that were enrolled prior to Fall 2025 may choose to graduate under older versions of these programs that require students to take at least one course in each of four Focus Areas.
Course Title Units Semester
11-722 Grammar Formalisms 12 Spring
11-723 Formal Semantics 12

Discontinued
11-724 Human Language for Artificial Intelligence 12 Fall
11-727 Computational Semantics for NLP 12 Discontinued (last offered in S19)
11-823 ConLanging: Learning Linguisics & Language Technologies via Construction of Artificial Languages 12 Spring
11-824 Subword Modeling 12 Spring
80-683 Language in Use 12 Fall
80-788 Acoustics of Human Speech: Theory, Data, & Analysis 12 Varies
Discontinued courses are shown because they still count for students that took them.
Course Title Units Semester
11-711 Advanced Natural Language Processing 12 Fall/Spring

10-601

Machine Learning
(MS students)
(Can only count under one focus area)

 12 Fall/Spring

10-701

Machine Learning
(PhD students)
(Can only count under one focus area)

 12 Fall/Spring
15-750 Algorithms in the Real World 12 Fall
15-780 Graduate Artificial Intelligence 12 Spring
Course Title Units Semester
11-667 Large Language Models Methods and Application 12 Fall
11-767 On-Device Machine Learning 12 Fall

11-685/11-785

Introduction to Deep Learning

 12 Fall/Spring

10-601

Introduction to Machine Learning
(MS students)
(Can only count under one focus area)

 12 Fall/Spring
10-605 Machine Learing with Large Datasets 12 Fall/Spring
10-618 Machine Learning for Structured Data 12 Last offered in F22
10-701 Introduction to Machine Learning
(PhD students)
(Can only count under one focus area)		 12 Fall/Spring
10-707 Advanced Deep Learning 12 Spring
10-708 Probabilistic Graphical Models 12 Spring
10-715 Advanced Introduction to Machine Learning 12 Fall

10-725

 Convex Optimization 12 Fall/Spring

15-883

 Computational Models of Neural Systems 12 Fall

36-705

 Intermediate Statistics 12 Fall
Discontinued courses are shown because they still count for students that took them.
Course Title Units Semester
10-605/10-805 Machine Learning with Large Datasets 12 Spring
11-641/11-741 Machine Learning for Text and Graph-based Mining 12 Replaced by 11-741 below
11-642/11-742 Search Engines 12 Fall/Spring
11-692 Speech Processing /
Speech Technology for Conversational AI		 12 Fall/Spring
11-737 Multilingual NLP 12 Uncertain (last offered F23)
11-741 Machine Learning with Graphs 12 Fall/Spring
11-747 Neural Networks for NLP 12 Discontinued (last offered S21)
11-751 Speech Recognition and Understanding 12 Fall
11-755 Machine Learning for Signal Processing 12 Fall
11-775 Large-Scale Multimedia Analysis 12 Fall/Spring
11-776 Multimodal Affective Computing 12 Discontinued (last offered S19)
11-777 Multimodal Machine Learning 12 Fall/Spring
11-685/11-785 Introduction to Deep Learning 12 Fall/Spring
11-797 Question Answering 12 Spring
11-851 Talking to Robots 12 Fall
11-877 Advanced Topics in Multimodal Machine Learning 12 Spring
11-891 Neural Code Generation 12 Spring
Discontinued courses are shown because they still count for students that took them.