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
• 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