Il titolo di language engineer non ha una definizione univoca. Se normalmente descrive un profilo ibrido fra linguista e informatico (siamo dalle parti della linguistica computazionale), a volte si ricorre a questo anglicismo anche per descrivere funzioni, per così dire, di "manovalanza tecnica", come la manutenzione di memorie di traduzione, l'inserimento dati per l'alimentazione di motori di traduzione, l'analisi testuale, etc.
Una recente offerta di Amazon così descriveva il profilo di language engineer richiesto:
strong experience in linguistic annotation, ontologies, taxonomies and/or semantic schemas. In this role, you will identify and solve issues directly affecting the customer experience by becoming an expert in annotation schemas and natural language understanding. Specifically, the Language Engineer will:
- Identify and solve production issues that are impacting the Alexa customer experience
- Collaborate with scientists and other Language Engineers in creating optimal solutions to elevate the customer experience
- Be an advocate for the strict adherence to annotation guidelines
- Provide day-to-day coordination of work requests, including planning, scheduling, and reporting
- Handle competing requests from a range of customers
Per questo posto si richiedevano:
- Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field
- 2+ years’ experience in computational linguistics, language data processing, semantics, philosophy of language
- Experience with language annotation and other forms of data markup
- Experience with ontologies and other semantic meaning representation schemas
- Experience working with speech and text language data in multiple languages
- Experience in Python, Perl or another scripting language
- Fluency in a language other than English
Dando la precedenza ha chi aveva le seguenti qualifiche:
- Advanced degree in a relevant field
- Deep expertise in building ontologies, taxonomies, and semantic meaning representation frameworks
- Experience in writing grammars and building FSTs
- Excellent communication, strong organizational skills and very detailed oriented
- Comfortable working in a fast paced, highly collaborative, dynamic work environment
- Willingness to support several projects at one time, and to accept reprioritization as necessary
- Must be able to think creatively and possess strong analytical and problem solving skills
- Familiarity with database queries and data analysis processes (SQL, R, Matlab, etc.)
- Experience with statistical language modeling
- Practical knowledge of version control and agile development
