[ddj] Computational linguistics careers?

Tue Oct 23 13:16:41 UTC 2012

I have a degree in computational linguistics (and work on DocumentCloud as
one can surmise by the email address).

One of the reasons why I was so interested in joining DocumentCloud is not
just because it's an interesting software development project (with nifty
FOSS tools the world knows) and that it aligns with my civic interests, but
also because it involves interesting computational problems.  DocumentCloud
uses the tesseract OCRing library (which is now maintained by Google),
Thompson Reuter's OpenCalais web service to do entity extraction (along
with some of our own little extractors), and the Lucene backed SOLR search
engine in order to index all of our documents.

My background in computational linguistics and the theories and analyses I
learned doing my degree are all applicable to the tools that make
DocumentCloud what it is.  The ability to correctly assess and connect
tools to solve a problem is not a trivial skill, and especially relevant in
fields where there's an abundance of text or audio to be processed.

In fact I would reiterate something that I've been told, which is that a
solid background in computational linguistics, particularly in Syntax &
Semantics gives one a pretty solid basis to understand advanced computer
science.  With some time out in the world and experience writing software,
computational linguists can be some pretty killer developers.

-Ted

On Tue, Oct 23, 2012 at 6:09 AM, Lilly Schwarz <lillyschwarzathome at gmail.com
> wrote:

> Esteemed listers,
>
> I have a student who has shown some promise in computational linguistics
> but is hesitant about the field. She seems very anti-military, and as a
> statistician, I'm having a tough time thinking of non-intel career paths
> she might choose. I'd love to hear your ideas.
>
> As much as I'd like to say that CAR is a huge growth area, I'd prefer to
> have something a bit less uncertain to give her as a backup. I assume I
> only have one strong chance to pitch this path before she discards the
> idea, so I want to get it right.
>
> Any suggestions? Thanks!
>
> Best,
>
> Lilly
>
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> data-driven-journalism at lists.okfn.org
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>
>

-- 
Ted Han
@knowtheory <http://twitter.com/knowtheory>
DocumentCloud
Investigative Reporters & Editors
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