>> Preparing for employment in linguistic research and development at corporations

John Moyne, Professor Emeritus
Ph.D. Program in Linguistics, City University of New York

Qualifications

It is more important, these days, to be a general computer literate than specializing in a particular project. Research centers have their own quirks and like to do things their own ways. They normally train new employees (part-time or full-time) for their jobs. Here are some suggestions to become computer literate.

Learn a programming language well and do as much practice in it as possible. Lisp and Prolog were generally recommended for Natural Language Processing (NLP), but nowadays developers use more common languages, such as C++, and with the growing interest in the Internet, Java and HTML. Java is becoming popular as a general programming language. At the Computer Science Department at Queens College in New York City, Java is taught as the basic programming language instead of Pascal, C, etc.

Learn to use Windows and applications and accessories associated with them for desktop and laptop computers at advanced levels, including Windows programming, macros, etc.

Learn the use and manipulation of the Internet.

Some of the above can be self-taught; all of the above can be studied at the undergraduate level at most colleges.

Recommended Courses

1. Regularly scheduled sentence processing and psycholinguistic courses.
2. Introduction to computational linguistics.
3. Mathematical linguistics and logic.
4. Theory of parsing, especially courses that include a review of parsing algorithms for computational purposes.

I think that the above preparations will provide students better opportunities to get teaching and research jobs at universities as well.

Maintained by Sally Morrison.