Careers in Computational Linguistics

This session covers:

• What can you do with Linguistics studies?
• What should students studying Linguistics do to enhance their employability during their university studies?
• How are the knowledge and skills gained from your Linguistics studies applicable to careers like Computational Linguistics?

Through your booking and in the session, you will have the opportunity to ask questions to leading industry professionals working in relevant roles and hear their experiences, stories and advice.

Date: Wednesday 21 September
Time: 4:00pm-5:00pm (AEST)
Online: Online via Zoom

Meet our panel

Stephen is a computer scientist specialising in computational linguistics, an inter-disciplinary field that draws on both linguistics and computer science. Stephen graduated from the University of Adelaide with a Bachelors of Art / Science majoring in Linguistics, Psychology, Mathematics, and Computer Science in 1999. He went on to complete his Honours in Computer Science (First Class) and PhD in Computational Linguistics, his thesis title was Sentence Augmentation: A Text-to-Text Generation Component for Summarisation.

With over 20 years of research experience, Stephen’s research employs natural language processing and text mining methods, in conjunction with machine learning, information retrieval and human computer interaction techniques. He leads a team of software engineers and researchers to build information management systems for a variety of text data types that are used by both the government and private sector for areas such as business intelligence, social media monitoring, and information systems for scientific literature.

Currently, Dr Wan's team is investigating research directions in natural language processing and information retrieval that supports research in other scholarly fields. The work, part of Data61's "AI for Science" direction, currently spans multiple disciplines, including computational social science, mental health, precision health, ecology and conservation, and agronomics.

Anton is a language scientist interested in research questions at the intersection of language, computation and psychology. He started his linguistics career with completing a Bachelors of Art in French translation in 2011 (Saint-Petersburg State University, Russia). He spent the next seven years studying how real-time language understanding interacts with human memory systems, completing a Masters (Saint-Petersburg State University, Russia) and a PhD (University of Maryland, USA). In the process, Anton became extremely interested in statistical and computational methods, which eventually led him to his current position in CSIRO. Here, Anton works on analysing how people express emotions on social media (especially in the context of mental health). Apart from linguistics, Anton is interested in methodological issues related to philosophy of science, statistical methodology, data analysis and archiving, and reproducible research. 

Martin is Lecturer in Applied Linguistics in the School of Language and Cultures at the University of Queensland, Australia (UQ) and Associate Professor II at the Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø (UiT).  Martin studied at the National University of Ireland, Galway, and Universität Kassel, Germany, where he graduated in 2008 with an MA in English Philology, Philosophy, and Psychology. He then moved to Hamburg where he completed his PhD in English linguistics.