Computers and information technology have become an integral part of the daily life of a modern person. Thanks to them, new professions began to appear.
Computational linguist: What does he do?
A computational linguist is a person who combines the knowledge of programming and linguistics. He develops speech and text recognition systems, as well as semantic translation algorithms. These skills are used to extract specific information from a large amount of data, for example, in electronic dictionaries, smart home systems, various gadgets, voice assistants.
What should a computational linguist know and be able to do?
- create morphological and syntactic markup, language models
- develop algorithms for machine translation
- develop electronic dictionaries and form databases
- evaluate the quality of work of computational linguistic applications
- use regular expressions to identify processes
- program systems for information extraction, speech recognition, and other products
- unite similar texts into groups
- work with text generators.
Possible areas of work: IT agencies, companies related to the creation of innovative applications.
The professional has the following skills:
- able to work with SQL
- applies machine learning technologies
- has excellent knowledge of structural aspects of language (syntax, semantics, phonology, phonetics)
- familiar with Big Data
- has the degree in computational linguistics or computer science (or equivalent experience) with linguistic solid background
- have experience in Python or other programming languages; ability to quickly translate ideas into code
- have experience with noisy and/or unstructured textual data
- know algorithms and data structures and implement them in Python
- have a strong background in implementing natural language processing solutions
- have experience using common NLP resources such as: ELMo, GloVe, spaCy, Apache OpenNLP, Stanford CoreNLP, NLTK, WordNet, etc.
- is able to understand artificial intelligence and can work with neural networks
- knows about NLP techniques for text representation and semantic modeling
- knows perfectly the grammar and punctuation of the English language
- knows several programming languages
- knows mathematical models in linguistics.
- design and implement a user-friendly graphical Java application for editing response/susceptibility matrices store in XML format.
- design and develop JavaScript and HTML code for scientific data file retrieval and download for the C/NOFS website.
Personal qualities
A computational linguist has the following characteristics:
- ability to concentrate on one task for a long time
- analytical mind
- attentiveness
- good memory
- high intelligence
- perseverance.
Pros and cons of the profession
Pros:
- competitive salary with flexible working hours demand
- the ability to work in several areas at once (programming, working with texts, data processing)
- social package: paid vacation and sick days, public holidays, fitness reimbursement, etc. while working in the company.
Cons:
- sedentary and painstaking work
- it is challenging to master the profession on your own.
A computational linguist’s annual salary averages $90,000, which breaks down to $44.00 an hour. However, computational linguists can earn anywhere from upwards of $60,000 to $150,000 a year. This means that the top-earning computational linguists make $75,000 more than the lowest-earning ones.
Do you get excited about solving complex problems in computational linguistics? Would you like to develop solutions for working with giant real-world data lakes to improve healthcare radically? Then do not forget to check out good vacancies for computational linguists on Jooble website.
