The institute is home to 33 faculty with the primary scholarly research of the institute focused on machine translation, speech recognition, speech synthesis, information retrieval, parsing, information extraction, and multimodal machine learning.

The MLT serves as a bridging masters for students from non-traditional backgrounds or with limited research experience in language technologies.

Notable faculty include Alan W Black (Speech), Louis-Philippe Morency (Multimodal Machine Learning), Scott Fahlman (Knowledge Representation), Justine Cassell (Human-computer interaction), Eric Nyberg (Information Retrieval), Carolyn Rosé (Learning Sciences), Eric Xing, and Alex Waibel (Speech Recognition), Rita Singh (voice forensics).

Co-founded by LTI faculty member Alon Lavie in 2009,[2] Safaba was acquired in 2015 by Amazon and incorporated into the company's Pittsburgh offices.

Co-founded by LTI Professor and MCDS program director Eric Nyberg,[3] The company's projects include work in targeted advertising,[4] oil and gas, and psychedelic drug research.