Re: Corpora: Corpus Linguistics User Needs

Philip Resnik (resnik@umiacs.umd.edu)
Fri, 31 Jul 1998 16:28:19 -0400 (EDT)

I'd like to follow up on Henning Reetz's and Ted Dunning's comments
regarding the influence of programming skills on job prospects for
linguists. As a faculty member in a linguistics department, I find
this question extremely pressing.

In a message last year on the LINGUIST list (Vol-8-380, Tue Mar 18
1997, ISSN: 1068-4875), Bill Croft posted a summary of responses he
had received in reply to a query about advice for prospective
Ph.D. students in linguistics. One important piece of advice was that
students should "develop expertise in a specialized area of
linguistics which gives them more job options", computational
linguistics among them.

The question, naturally, is: what constitutes sufficient computational
expertise to give a linguistics Ph.D. more job options, especially the
possibility of being competitive for an industry position? Ted
writes, "The programming skills I am talking about are not the kind
that a professional programmer should have. The required skills have
*far* less depth and breadth." So we are not talking about *ideal*
expertise. How can we characterize minimum expectations? Some
specific questions come to mind:

- Is programming experience in a classroom/class-project setting enough
to be competitive, or do students need a few successful non-classroom
programming projects on their c.v. to get serious consideration (if
so, how many)?

- Does programming expertise in any reasonably useful language (e.g. C,
C++, Java, Perl, LISP, Prolog) generally suffice, with the
assumption that students can learn new languages on the job,
or do students absolutely need experience in the language they'll
be using? (If the latter, which are the highest priority languages
for computational linguistics/NLP work?)

- How much of an understanding of fundamental computer science
concepts (e.g. basic computer architecture, fundamental algorithms,
computational complexity), if any, do you consider a minimum for
a student to be competitive in a computational linguistics job?

As someone who has had occasion in the past to interview/hire
computational linguists in an industry setting, I have my own personal
answers to these questions, and I realize that every job position is
different, as is every candidate. Still, I'd very much like to get a
broader view of other people's opinions, so that we in academia can do
the best possible job of helping linguistics students get the skills
they need to be competitive in today's job market.

Philip Resnik, Assistant Professor
Department of Linguistics and Institute for Advanced Computer Studies

1401 Marie Mount Hall UMIACS phone: (301) 405-6760
University of Maryland Linguistics phone: (301) 405-8903
College Park, MD 20742 USA Fax : (301) 405-7104
http://umiacs.umd.edu/~resnik E-mail: resnik@umiacs.umd.edu