Linguist [AQ-19849]
Licensed sponsor London, England, United Kingdom Contract Posted 1 hour ago
Join a leading technology innovator, partnering with Aquent, that is at the forefront of shaping how people connect and interact globally. This is an unparalleled opportunity to leverage your linguistic expertise to directly influence the development of cutting-edge AI technologies, ensuring they are inclusive, accurate, and culturally nuanced for a massively multilingual user base. Your contributions will be critical in advancing the understanding and application of language in AI, impacting millions worldwide.
About The Role
We are seeking a highly skilled and passionate linguist to join our dynamic team, where you will play a pivotal role in refining and developing AI models that communicate effectively across diverse cultures and languages. This position offers the chance to dive deep into linguistic analysis, tackle complex challenges in responsible AI, and collaborate with world-class engineers and research scientists. Your work will directly enhance the quality and ethical application of AI in global communication, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.
What You’ll Do
Must-Have Qualifications
Our Client is the largest social media company in the world. They have substantial B2B and B2C advertising and media platforms, as well as a nonprofit initiative. With the mission of bringing people together, they now boast over 2 billion users, and are rapidly developing as they influence the world around us.
Aquent is dedicated to improving inclusivity & is proudly an equal opportunities employer. We encourage applications from under-represented groups & are committed to providing support to applicants with disabilities. We aim to provide reasonable accommodation for any part of the employment process, to those with a medical condition, disability or neurodivergence.
About The Role
We are seeking a highly skilled and passionate linguist to join our dynamic team, where you will play a pivotal role in refining and developing AI models that communicate effectively across diverse cultures and languages. This position offers the chance to dive deep into linguistic analysis, tackle complex challenges in responsible AI, and collaborate with world-class engineers and research scientists. Your work will directly enhance the quality and ethical application of AI in global communication, pushing the boundaries of what’s possible.
What You’ll Do
- Perform in-depth linguistic analyses on large datasets to uncover patterns and insights.
- Conduct comprehensive linguistic error analysis of AI model outputs, identifying the most frequent and severe error categories.
- Develop and refine guidelines for human annotation and various AI projects, including translation tasks.
- Execute typological and sociolinguistic research across numerous languages, highlighting their similarities and differences.
- Perform critical linguistic analyses for Responsible AI initiatives, addressing toxic language, hate speech, gender bias, and other cultural biases in massively multilingual environments.
- Conduct thorough linguistic literature reviews on NLP-adjacent topics and effectively summarize findings.
- Evaluate the quality of deliveries from various vendors, pinpointing error patterns, and providing actionable feedback.
- Offer expert information and guidance on all aspects of linguistic knowledge, including typology, morpho-syntax, sociolinguistics, classification, phonetics/phonology, and pragmatics.
- Engage with and collaborate alongside native speakers of various languages.
- Clearly communicate the results of complex linguistic analyses to engineers and research scientists.
Must-Have Qualifications
- Near-native or native proficiency in a language other than English, specifically from the Dravidian or Bantu families (Swahili proficiency is a significant asset).
- Near-native or native proficiency in English.
- Proficiency in Python for coding and SQL for querying databases.
- PhD in Linguistics or a related field (degree must be completed, not in progress).
- A very firm grasp of the following linguistic fields: language typology, syntax, morphology, sociolinguistics (especially dialectology and discourse analysis), corpus linguistics, writing systems, and pragmatics, phonology.
- Experience applying basic Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques.
- Strong written and spoken communication skills, particularly in business and research contexts.
- Ability to independently manage complex requests and perform effectively under pressure.
- Strong ability to work autonomously, prioritize tasks, plan and track work, and report progress.
- Self-motivation is essential.
- Relevant professional experience.
- Experience working cross-functionally within teams.
- Experience collaborating with machine learning, NLP, or software engineers, or data scientists.
- Experience contributing to research papers.
- Working knowledge in additional languages, especially a low-resource language.
- Education or training in the basics of project management.
- Working knowledge of international language-classification standards.
- A background or specialization in corpus linguistics.
- Experience with fieldwork.
- Preferably no known conflicts of interest in the fields of machine translation, ASR, TTS, or LLM research, as linguists in this role will be contributing to research papers.
Our Client is the largest social media company in the world. They have substantial B2B and B2C advertising and media platforms, as well as a nonprofit initiative. With the mission of bringing people together, they now boast over 2 billion users, and are rapidly developing as they influence the world around us.
Aquent is dedicated to improving inclusivity & is proudly an equal opportunities employer. We encourage applications from under-represented groups & are committed to providing support to applicants with disabilities. We aim to provide reasonable accommodation for any part of the employment process, to those with a medical condition, disability or neurodivergence.
