In other words,
however much we try and automate the processes of understanding what a web
page, a query, a text or even just a single sentence means, we know that the
expert human linguist will still be a crucial factor in programming machines to
understand better.
This role, by the way,
was amply brought home in early December, when the UK firm Crystal Semantics
was acquired by a media tech company: most of the commentary highlighted the
fact that the founder David Crystal’s team of linguists took ten years to
handcraft a disambiguation and categorisation engine for English (and other
language) web pages that would aid a “sense” engine to understand the gist of polysemic
words. Machine learning clearly can’t do it all.
To find out more about
the job market for such linguists, LT Innovate talked to Maxim Khalilov the
founder of NLPeople and Nick Gallimore at Natural Language Recruiter, the language technology wing
of the mployability site in the UK, to find out more about job needs
in the LT industry as a whole.
Maxim Khalilov started
the NLPeople site in May 2012, and now publishes around 60-80 jobs for
researchers and scientists in industry per month, finding demand to be fairly
stable. New rounds of European Commission-funded projects tend to spark a rise
in demand, and he also noted a “moderate increase of about 5-10 %” in October
2012, May 2012 and June 2013, probably due to business expansion activities among
big players on the NLP market. His primary focus is in fact on the research community,
so his data do not necessarily reflect the global job scene.
Nick Gallimore has been
working exclusively on job openings in the LT industry under the general mployability
banner for three years now, and decided to focus on the LT industry via the dedicated
Natural Language Recruiter brand. He himself is passionate about language and
technology and is keen to build credibility in this fast-growing space.
For him, job openings
in the field fluctuate considerably from month-to-month. “It takes companies
quite a long time to hire people (their requirements are often very different
to research organisations) so it's not usually clear how ‘new’ a vacancy is.” But
quoting figures that are close to those cited by NLPeople, “we see 250-350 job openings
in industry each year in Europe, and a similar level each year in the US. We also
believe that there is quite a lot of commercial-side hiring in the LT space that
takes place ‘under the radar’.”
Which LT fields do these
jobs address? Khalilov sees increased demand in the machine translation
industry in Europe and in the USA, as well as more positions for speech
processing experts. The latest tendency is crowdsourcing – “we regularly
receive jobs submitted as a part of various language crowdsourcing projects.” And
of course the data analytics/data scientist segment offers a growing number of exciting
openings for NLP people.
Not surprisingly, NLP
developers with the hands-on implementation experience are much in demand. A
solid NLP background knowledge is mostly required, in some cases in combination
with the language expertise. Language technology researchers and scientists
with proven coding skills are taking second place.
What sorts of
companies are advertising for NLP expertise? NLPeople receives lot of jobs from
the recruitment agencies which, in many cases, prefer not to reveal the actual
employer. A second major segment covers jobs at the “IT monsters”. Although Khalilov
sees great potential in other companies needing NLP expertise, he reckons that
they mostly “prefer to buy solutions and focus on integration only.” Then there
are the NLP-oriented start-ups that typically require a broad outlook of
computational linguistics, data mining and machine learning technologies.
Geographically
speaking, Natural Language Recruiter works worldwide, even though the initial
focus is on the UK. “We have clients in the UK, US, France, Spain, Germany, the
Netherlands and China as LT is a truly international space,” says Gallimore.
For Khalilov, the USA
is an “absolute leader on the industrial NLP market” – especially on the West
Coast and in the Greater New York area. In Europe, there are a large number of localization
jobs in Ireland “the localization Mecca of the Old World.”
A noticeable number of
start-ups concentrating their efforts on the interface between NLP and machine
learning appeared in 2011-2013 in France, Germany and Spain. While in Germany these
new companies tend to stick close to big university centres, in France and
Spain virtually 100% of them are in the Paris and Barcelona areas respectively.
Overall, then, LT jobs
are on the rise. Let’s hope the LT industry harvests the benefits.
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