Professional Development Workshop Getting a Linguistics Job outside

Professional Development Workshop Getting a Linguistics Job outside of Academia Jobs in the Industry Chilin Shih February 18, 2016 UIUC Linguistics

Today's Linguist List Jobs 60 jobs under “manager” and “other” There are more: Many industrial jobs are not advertised on Linguist List Some advertise on linkedin. com, Many companies are hiring when a good candidate turns up. They don't necessarily recruit by posting job ads

Jobs in the Industry Computational linguistics Speech technologies Google, Apple, Amazon, IBM, AT&T, Nuance … Translation Language teaching Language testing ETS, Pearson … Data mining Dialog system Advertising, and many others

Companies from A to Z are Hiring Linguists Amazon Microsoft Apple Nuance ETS Oracle Facebook Youtube Google IBM

Language-based Technologies Computational linguistics: Speech technologies: Text analysis, parsing, morphological analysis, information retrieval (IR), machine translation (MT), document analysis, document classification, character recognition (OCR), name pronunciation … Speech recognition (ASR), Text-to-speech synthesis (TTS), language/speaker identification, name pronunciation Language testing: Automatic scoring of speech fluency and essay

What Skills are Needed? In the industry, you are typically THE linguist on the team, and you are the expert on Languages Syntax, Semantics Phonetic, Phonology, Acoustics Social linguistics Language variation Historical linguistics Discourse Pragmatics

Speech Technologies with Natural Language Processing Google has Google Voice Apple has Siri AT&T has Watson IBM also has Watson Amazon has Echo Facebook tested it in Messenger a year ago They are all perfecting it and building for more and more languages—creating many job opportunities for linguists

Localization All companies want to grow from local to global market. When a product involves languages, it means adapting to all of the local languages and cultures. In today's Linguist List jobs: Amazon: Japanese, German Artificial Solutions (talk to your devices in natural lang): Spainish, German Lionbridge (translation): Danish, French, Hebrew, Chinese, Mandarin, Wu, Dutch, Portuguese, Russian, Turkish, Korean

Amazon Two Amazon jobs were announced on the Linguist List yesterday (2/17) (1) General Linguistics (2) Computational linguistics; discourse analysis; phonetics; semantics; sociolinguistics; English; Japanese Amazon is building Amazon Echo – a wireless voice command device with speech recognition, speech synthesis and dialogue system, hence all the listed linguistic fields.

Amazon Echo Job Descriptions (1) Data specialist: Comp Ling, Discourse analysis, phonetics, semantics, sociolinguistics MA or Ph. D in linguistics, sociolinguistics, computational linguistics, or human-computer interaction. Work with language modelers and speech scientists as well as data analysts to provide analysis of speech interactions with Amazon devices. (2) Data specialist; General Linguistics Condense complex and ambiguous concepts into clear, straightforward conventions materials

Adecco Job Descriptions for TTS Localization (1) Speech data evaluator – – – Developing rules for a text normalization system – Text-to-Speech quality evaluation and testing Large scale data mining Customizing language building tools for your language (2) Manager – Creating verbalization rules, such as expanding URLs, email addresses, numbers – Creating annotation conventions

Nuance Job Description for Dialog System Language engineer Implementation of dialog flows and grammar (with customer) Test dialog in development environment and on the infotainment system Evaluating system, analysis of tickets, provide bug fixing Localization

The more a company considers language diversity in the design and implementation of a language-based technology, the easier it is to do rapid localization.

Analysis of tickets? Fixing bugs? Why Industry Needs Linguists Case I

When speech recognition was just robust enough to get out of research and into the market place, one of the first applications is pay by phone (There was a time before smart phones)

Please say your credit card number and pin

Problems! Many transactions were not completed. No payment? No business. Go look at the costumer log/tickets.

Five four one two seven five one two three four three two one ten Five five two nine four two zero three five six seven eight five six ten Four three two one five three one two three four ten

Aha! Pin-pen merger!(social linguistics knowledge kicked in) Aha! Telephone speech! Possible p/t confusion (acoustics knowledge kicked in) Ten = Pin

Linguist Saved the Day (And millions of dollars) Problem: Some people heard Please say your credit card number and ten Solution: Change the prompt to Please say your credit card number and personal identification number

Why Industry Needs Linguists Case II

Names Brand Names

Lexicon Branding “Just how important is a name? My simple answer to this is, nothing will be used for a longer period of time or more often than a company’s name. It’s not just a creative exercise. It’s a strategic one. ” - David Placek, The Pentium Black. Berry Power. Book Zune Swifter Subaru Outback Desk. Jet Dasani

Linguists at Lexicon Branding Will Leben, phonolo gist at Applying linguistic analysis to brand names: Lexicon (of course) Semantics Imagery (Universal) Sound symbolism History Cross-cultural interpretations

How to Prepare for an Industrial Job Courses Mindset All areas of linguistics Enjoy your work Computational Linguistics Develop linguistic awareness in all areas (Big) Data analysis Language technologies Attune to the need of the society, company, application Find your niche Provide value Enjoy more

How to Find an Industrial Job Many companies don't advertise jobs. Wouldn't it be nice if they contact you. That may happen if you say or write the right thing at the right time in the right place. Build credential (beyond your linguistic specialty): • • • Know the companies, technologies and applications that interest you Analyze designs, problems and solutions Make a hobby collecting linguistic patterns Build network: • • Go to conferences Join relevant professional social networks