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 potential  Creative work  Evaluative work  Research work  Corpus 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 recognition  Text to speech  Natural language understanding

EMPLOYMENT Linguistic work:  Speech recognition and production  Corpus annotation  Grammar 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