Many linguists are faced with the choice between working in industry and working in academia. The working environments are substantially different. In discussion with linguists working in industry, many of whom had formerly worked in academia, CLABU produced this list of differences:
|
Industry:
Practical application of linguistics |
Academia:
Research & teaching |
||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
If industry sounds like an option for you, perhaps you should consider a job in computational linguistics, which involves work in areas such as speech technology, information extraction, text mining, machine translation, automatic summarization, etc.
Large corpora determine statistics of co-occurrence
Transcriptions & phonological rules indicate word pronunciation
Corpora provide new words for dictionary
Speech recordings provide acoustic data
Morphological info improves accuracy
We use linguistic knowledge not to do linguistics but to:
|
Collect text data Decide on 'normal' forms Develop language models Determine phoneme/phone sets Provide acoustic data Improve dictionary |
Transcribe new words
phonetically Create rewrite rules for formatting Work in different languages & dialects Use part-of-speech info to improve recognition Develop algorithms to compare input & models Write morphological analyzers |
|---|
| Best candidate has: |
|---|
| Advanced degree in linguistics |
| Coursework or major in computational linguistics or computer science |
| Knowledge of foreign language(s) |
| Computer scripting or programming skills |
| Work or internship in industry |
Adequate preparation for a career in any of the areas of language technology is important; nowadays, a linguist should have sufficient background in computer science and computational linguistics as well as theoretical linguistics.
Researched by Aisha
The following companies hire computational linguists for work in various aspects of speech technology - corpus development, language modeling, scripting and programming, phonetic transcription, grammar checking, and development of lexical resources. These companies may also hire linguists for localization of products for sale in other countries.
CL Research - tools for developing lexical databases
http://www.clres.com/
Comverse - speech technology for computers and internet
http://www.comverse.com
Cycorp
http://www.cyc.com
IBM - dictation software for English and other languages
http://www-4.ibm.com/software/speech/
Language Intelligence - a linguistic software company
http://www.languageintelligence.com
Lingsoft - a linguistic software company
http://www.lingsoft.fi/
Lionbridge - web-based localization of software products for non-English languages
http://www.lionbridge.com/Default.asp?intPageID=431
Microsoft - software for dictation and text-to-speech
http://www.microsoft.com
Mason Integrated Technologies - language processing and localization software for creole languages
http://hometown.aol.com/mit2usa/Index2.html
The Nuancing Group - creating new brand names
http://nuancing.com
Phonetic Systems
http://www.phoneticsystems.com
Scansoft - speech recognition systems
http://www.scansoft.com
SDL - machine translation
http://www.freetranslation.com/
Transparent Language - software for second language learners
http://www.transparent.com
Voicesignal
http://www.voicesignal.com
I've also seen job ads for linguists at the following companies:
For lists of more companies that hire linguists, check out MultiLingual Computing, Inc. This website offers job listings in translation, localization, NLP, and computational linguistics:
http://www.multilingual.com
Also take a look at the job bulletin board run by LSA:
http://web.gc.cuny.edu
And of course, the Linguist List is probably the best source for job ads for linguists:
http://linguistlist.org/jobs/index.html