The Johns Hopkins Center for Language and Speech Processing (CLSP) is an interdisciplinary research and educational center focused on the science and technology of language and speech. Within its field, CLSP is recognized as one of the largest and most influential academic research centers in the world. The center conducts research across a broad spectrum of fundamental and applied topics including acoustic processing, automatic speech recognition, big data, cognitive modeling, computational linguistics, information extraction, machine learning, machine translation, and text analysis. It is home to over sixty researchers, including faculty, research scientists, postdocs, graduate students, and undergraduates drawn from the departments of cognitive science, computer science, electrical and computer engineering, and mathematical sciences. Linguistics is an active area of research in the Cognitive Science Department; see the overview of their linguistics focus for more details.
As part of its educational mission, CLSP coordinates a full complement of courses dealing with a diverse array of topics in language and speech. It also offers a weekly seminar featuring prominent speakers in speech and language processing. Finally, it is the host of the widely-known CLSP summer research workshop, an event drawing researchers at all levels (faculty to undergraduate) from around the world to conduct intensive research on fundamental problems. Hosted annually since 1995, the workshop has produced many important advances in speech and language technology.
CLSP was established in 1992 with support from the US Government (NSF, DARPA, DoD) and grew to prominence under the directorship of the late Frederick Jelinek (1932-2010). In 2007 CLSP gained a sibling, the Johns Hopkins Human Language Technology Center of Excellence (HLTCOE), a government-funded research center investigating all aspects of advanced language technology. HLTCOE and its researchers are tightly integrated into CLSP.