Natural Language Talent in the UK

Natural Language Talent in the UK Identifying, attracting and hiring the Natural Language & Computational Linguistics professionals in the UK

• Skillbase supply & demand

• Academic & research activities

• Commercial development

• Salary overview

• Barriers to market

Natural Language Talent in the UK

Natural Language Overview What do we mean by “Natural Language”? Broadly speaking, the Natural Language industry incorporates companies and professionals involved in applications of the theories surrounding the human ability to make and interpret language. Our primary areas of interest are non-clinical, and closely tied to the computing industry. Computing applications of linguistic theory are primarily interested in advancing artificial intelligence in some way through the use of language. R & D activities in this area include: o Natural Language Processing (helping computers understand and process

human language input)

o Machine Learning (allowing computers to learn new concepts or outputs based on large amounts of data)

o Semantic Analysis & Search (using computers to automatically interpret the meaning of passages of human language input)

o Speech Recognition (helping computers to interpret human language)

o Text Analysis (using computers to analyse large amounts of textual)

Natural Language Talent in the UK

The UK Scene Established Academic Scene Beginning to Power Commercial Growth The UK benefits from well-established academic Computational Linguistics centres. Of particular note are: • Cambridge (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/nl/) • Oxford (http://www.clg.ox.ac.uk/) • Edinburgh (www.ilcc.inf.ed.ac.uk) • Sheffield (http://nlp.shef.ac.uk/) • Sussex (http://www.sussex.ac.uk/calps/) • Leeds (http://www.comp.leeds.ac.uk/nlp/) • Wolverhampton (http://clg.wlv.ac.uk/) This is in addition to a rapidly-growing number of academic activities in more traditional, non-computational Linguistics research, which is taking place in universities across the UK.

Natural Language Talent in the UK

Typical Academic Research Projects Examples of real-world Natural Language research taking place in the UK right now With no particular emphasis or order: http://www.italkproject.org/ - aims to develop artificial embodied agents able to acquire complex behavioural, cognitive, and linguistic skills through individual and social learning. Uses humanoid robot to learn to handle and manipulate objects and tools autonomously, to cooperate and communicate with other robots and humans, and to adapt to changing internal, environmental, and social conditions. http://divf.eng.cam.ac.uk/faust/Main/WebHome - The FAUST project will develop machine translation (MT) systems which respond rapidly and intelligently to user feedback. http://groups.inf.ed.ac.uk/ccg/index.html - Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) is an efficiently parseable, yet linguistically expressive grammar formalism. It has a completely transparent interface between surface syntax and underlying semantic representation, including predicate-argument structure, quantification and information structure. These are just a few examples, exciting and innovative NLP & Computational Linguistics research projects are taking place across the UK academic scene.

Natural Language Talent in the UK

The Commercial Environment The UK is a great place to build NLP & Computational Linguistics teams. Just ask these companies…. Speech Recognition

Sentiment Analysis

Text Analysis Language Input

Natural Language Talent in the UK

Supply & Demand: Good Timing Supply is relatively strong, demand is growing The interesting things about the UK at the moment is the relatively strong supply of talent coupled with growing demand.

Postgraduate & PhD students exist in fairly good numbers. There

is strong supply of people currently working in academic research

roles.

Generally, these people are very interested in commercial

opportunities when presented to them properly.

However, the strength of demand is growing very quickly.

Computational Linguists are fast becoming in-demand: where five years ago commercial opportunities were weak, the early dawn of Web 3.0 (the Semantic Web) is leading to a much stronger selection of commercial opportunities. We expect this trend to accelerate rapidly.

Demand for Computational Linguistics professionals (2006 – 2011) (from indeed.com)

Natural Language Talent in the UK

Hiring Challenges Because if it was easy, it would be no fun Despite the positive hiring outlook, wider labour market challenges for employers are particularly acute in this NLP/Computational Linguistics space, because: 1) It’s still very niche And that means that numbers are low. When we talk about supply and demand everything is relative; absolute numbers of people with marketable skills is low 2) Access is very difficult These people are mostly postgraduate level individuals with strong personal and academic interests. They are rarely the kind of people who sit around applying to job posting and shouting about how hard they are looking for work. They are unlikely to be “career-advancement-savvy”. To access the talent, you need to work with people with deep industry knowledge and connections. 3) Fear is prevalent at the moment The labour market generally is frozen with fear at the moment: people are generally timid about changing jobs right now, primarily due to the endless stream of negative news they are hearing. This problem is particularly acute in niche sectors with strong demand. To overcome this, it helps to have a great story, solid ideas and the help of someone active in the market.