Job Title: Linguist III

Duration: 02 Months

Location: Remote role. West coast preferred. CWs cannot be located in TX or Illinois as those 2 states have passed laws that are incompatible with our data collection agreements.
Note: Please make sure the resume is CLEAR on which language the candidate is being submitted with and the CEFRL level.

Overview:

• Must have a PhD in Linguistics IN HAND. Not just working to get one.
• A graduate degree in Literature or English is not an appropriate substitution.
• A degree in Computer Science with a specialization in NLP is not an appropriate substitution.
• A degree in Computational Linguistics is not the same as theoretical Linguistics and is not an appropriate substitution.

Must have:

Near-native or native proficiency in a language other than English, more specifically a language of the following families or groups:

• Central Philippine (esp. Filipino, Tagalog, Cebuano)
• Tai-Kadai (esp. Thai, Lao)
• Bantu (esp. Swahili)
• Northwestern Semitic (esp. Hebrew), Ethiosemitic
• Near native or native proficiency in English.
• Proficiency in a low-resource language is valued.
• Working knowledge in other languages is a plus.
• Must be able to code in Python (must) and query databases using SQL, other coding languages used for data analysis are a plus.
• Must be able to independently work through complex requests and perform under pressure.
• Strong ability to work independently, prioritize, plan, and track work, as well as report progress
• education or training in the basics of project management is a plus
• self-motivation is a must
• Working knowledge of international language-classification standards is valued.

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 native speakers in various languages.
• Communicate results of linguistic analyses to engineers and research scientists.

Skills:

• Must have strong written and spoken communication skills, especially business and research communication.

Education:

• Graduate degree in Linguistics or related field is a must; PhD is a plus
• 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 FAIR Linguists need to be contributing to research papers)

Interview Process:

• A one-hour technical interview including linguistics questions and a Python coding exercise
• [If technical interview is solid] A 30-to-45-minute behavioral interview 

 
 
At SPECTRAFORCE, we are committed to maintaining a workplace that ensures fair compensation and wage transparency in adherence with all applicable state and local laws.This position's pay range is $50.00/hr - $60.00/hr.