CAREERS IN LINGUISTICS OUTSIDE OF ACADEMIA

CAREERS IN INDUSTRY

COMPANIES THAT HIRE LINGUISTS

• LEXICON BRANDING• NUANCE COMMUNICATIONS• GOOGLE• MICROSOFT• ETHNIC TECHNOLOGIES

LEXICON BRANDING

• Main focus: brand naming• Creates global brand names for high-tech,

entertainment and consumer goods companies• Utilizes specific methods and creates new methods

to invent and identify names that have potentialCreative workEvaluative workResearch workCorpus linguistics

CREATIVE WORK

• Individual or small group work• Applies linguistic knowledge to

create words with potential • Works with morphology,

phonology and metaphors in order to best represent a product

EVALUATIVE WORK

• Cross-linguistic and cross-cultural evaluation of names• Linguistic assets of potential

names• Name testing with consumers

RESEARCH WORK

Conveys the stories a word can tell

Conveys what values the word holds

NUANCE COMMUNICATIONS

• Main focus: the use of specific methods of dialogue and conversation to more easily interact with today’s complex technology

Speech recognitionText to speechNatural language understanding

EMPLOYMENT

• Linguistic work:Speech recognition and

productionCorpus annotationGrammar engineering• Creates algorithms for syntax, semantics

and pragmatics

GOOGLE

• Linguistics at Google:Concentrates on understanding

meanings of keywords Enhances algorithms in machine

learning to create better reasoning based on spoken words together with their meaning

Improves communication

LINGUISTIC PROJECTS

• Natural language processing • Text classification –Computational linguistics knowledge

• Speech analysis –Phonetic annotation knowledge

• Advertising department: linguists oversee algorithms in ad space– Structured and unstructured data

knowledge

Recommended Coursework

• Linguistic Theory • Corpus linguistics• Textual analysis• Lexicography• Programming (Java, Python, query

languages)• Data analysis and basic statistics• Machine learning• Project Management

MICROSOFT

• Natural Language Processing Group Language Understanding• Deconstructs language into its parts• Classifies and categorizes to gather information

Language Generation• Creates language from non-linguistic data and

semantic representations using various data input methods• Creates descriptions of visible objects

LINGUISTIC TASKS

• Constituency parsing• Dependency parsing• Semantic role labeling• Named entity recognition• Sentiment Analysis• Semantic Analysis

REQUIRED SKILLS

• Strong linguistic background• Crowdsourcing • Programming • Statistics

ETHNIC TECHNOLOGIES

• Focus: multicultural marketing• Language and ethnicity• Predicts ethnicity based on

names and location

LINGUISTIC KNOWLEDGE

• Specific languages• Morphology and phonology• Hypothesis testing

SUPPLEMENTARY SKILLS

• Statistics• Database experience• Basic programming• Analysis of large data sets