Linguist - Ph.D.

Main duties:

• Perform linguistic analyses on large datasets.
• Perform linguistic error analysis of AI model outputs, determining what the most frequent and severe error categories are.
• Write and revise guidelines for human annotation and other AI projects, including but not limited to translation tasks.
• Conduct typological and sociolinguistic research on a large number of languages, highlighting their similarities and differences.
• Perform linguistic analyses for Responsible AI (toxic language, hate speech, gender bias and other cultural biases) in massively multilingual settings.
• Conduct linguistic literature reviews on various NLP-adjacent topics and summarize findings.
• Compare the quality of deliveries between vendors, identify error patterns, and provide actionable feedback.
• Provide information or guidance relative to any aspect of linguistic knowledge (typology, morpho-syntax, sociolinguistics, classification, phonetics/phonology, pragmatics, etc.).
• Reach out to and collaborate with speakers in various languages.
• Communicate results of linguistic analyses to engineers and research scientists.

Education:

• PhD Graduate degree in Linguistics or related field is a must.
• a background or specialization in corpus linguistics is a plus
• experience with field work is a plus
• a graduate degree in Literature or English is not an appropriate substitution
• degree in Computer Science with a specialization in NLP is not an appropriate substitution
• Must have a very firm grasp of the following linguistic fields: language typology, syntax, morphology, sociolinguistics (especially dialectology and discourse analysis), corpus linguistics, writing systems, pragmatics, phonology.
• Must have some experience with applying basic Natural Language Processing techniques.

Experience

• Years of experience: 0-3
• Experience working cross-functionally
• Experience collaborating with machine learning, NLP, or software engineers, or data scientists
• Experience contributing to research papers
• Important: Preferably no known conflicts of interest in the fields of machine translation, ASR, TTS, or LLM research (as Linguists need to be contributing to research papers)

Top 3 must-have HARD skills:

• Solid grasp of General Linguistics theory at the research level.
• Cross-functional communication and project management.
• Experience with Python.

Must have bilingual proficiency in a language from the following families or groups, as well as near-proficiency in English:

• Central Philippine (esp. Filipino, Tagalog, Cebuano).
• Tai-Kadai (esp. Thai, Lao).
• Bantu (esp. Swahili).
• Northwestern Semitic (esp. Hebrew), Ethiosemitic.

Good to have skills:

• Experience with creating and/or maintaining specialized lexical resources (e.g., profanity dictionaries) is a plus.
• Ability to independently work through ambiguous requests, based on priorities established by manager, and perform under pressure. Able to work cross functionally.