Panel Discussion: Careers for Linguists in Industry

Alexa, what does Nori do at Amazon?

Noriyasu Li, who is a Program Manager at Alexa International, will take you behind the scenes and talk about what he does at Alexa in Amazon coming from a Linguistics background. First he will provide an overview of the voice assistant technology to give an idea of how various linguistics components contribute to its functionality. He will also share how he was able to craft a career in tech as a Linguistics PhD - his background, training, how he got through the door, and how he navigated his career from language engineer to program manager of the Japanese spoken language understanding architecture of Alexa.

Elise Thorsen is a Senior Open Source (that is, unclassified source) Analyst at Novetta, a company providing advanced analytics and technical solutions to defense, intelligence community, and other U.S. government customers. Elise graduated from the Russian Literature PhD program in Slavic Languages & Literatures at Pitt in 2016 and joined Novetta shortly after. Her primary duties include the design and maintenance of data collection schemas meant to characterize the content, sentiment, and sources of (mis)information in publicly available information, along with regular reporting on trends and patterns in this data.

Elise will describe working at the intersection of customer requests for information and the available toolkit of NLP and content analysis tools, and how this is a productive space for developing tools that can enhance the usability of state-of-the-art NLP – the impetus for Novetta’s open source package Adapt NLP – or for responding to customer needs in a rapid and tailored fashion using the tools available. She will also provide some information about her job search and the value that the combination of deep area expertise and coursework experience in Digital Humanities and Computational Linguistics brought to that search and to career advancement.