Linguist II

Job Title: Linguist II -  Marathi/ Tamil
Duration: 6 Months
Location: Remote
 
Job Description:
Remote role.

• 3-4 years of experience required.
• Bachelor’s degree in linguistics, language technologies, computational linguistics, speech science, or related field.
• Language requirement for this role: Marathi OR Tamil 
• Candidates need to be linguists experts, not just native speakers.

 
Top 3 must-have HARD skills:

• Native-level fluency in one of Marathi / Tamil
• Familiarity with command-line, scripting, and versioning systems
• Phonetics/phonology, including experience with transcription in IPA or SAMPA -OR- experience with regexes

 
Good to have skills:

•  
• Data analysis

 
Story Behind the Need – Business Group & Key Projects:

• Core responsibilities of TTS:
• Build and improve TTS models (speech generation) to sound more natural, expressive, and robust, including things like prosody and non-verbal cues (e.g., laughter/breath)
• Multilingual + i18n support: expand language coverage and handle tricky cases like code-switching, accents, and language ID
• Deploy/integrate models into products (sometimes including on-device inference constraints for wearables)
• Evaluation + quality measurement: develop pipelines/guidelines to measure naturalness and expressivity
• Native speaker expertise for new TTS locales

 
Compelling Story & Candidate Value Proposition:

• Varied tasks, lots of opportunities to leverage native speaker insights for linguistic applications
• This role allows a lot of freedom to affect the voice quality for users in their native language to ensure they have the best possible user experience

 
Typical Day in the Role:

• Provide linguistic expertise in the areas of phonetics, phonology, lexicography, dialectology, and NLP.
• Provide native speaker input and feedback on product quality
• Develop and/or evaluate large-scale labeled datasets for varying NLP applications such as language ID, text normalization, G2P, and audio alignments
• Create and perfect text normalization processes.
• Manage lexical and phrasal transcriptions and related metadata.
• Analyze system metrics such as user opinion, lexicon transcription coverage, and POS tagger performance and remedy pain points.

 
How will performance be measured:

• Task completion

 
Summary:

• The main function of a TTS Linguist CW is to determine speech data needs and make for data based model and product improvements.

 
Job Responsibilities:

• Provide linguistic expertise in the areas of phonetics, phonology, lexicography, dialectology, and NLP.
• Design and conduct experiments for evaluating transcription quality.
• Develop manual and automated processes for multiple concurrent projects including ensuring high-quality label alignments, prosodic classification, POS identification and disambiguation, targeted modeling data, and user feedback.
• Create and perfect text normalization and inverse text normalization processes.
• Manage lexical and phrasal transcriptions and related metadata.
• Analyze system metrics such as user opinion, lexicon transcription coverage, and POS tagger performance and remedy pain points.

 
Skills:

• Knowledge of phonetics, phonology, sociolinguistics, dialectology and other areas of linguistics.
• Ability to analyze waveforms and spectrograms.
• Knowledge of prescriptive writing and punctuation conventions for at least one language.
• Excellent communication skills both verbal and written.
• Knowledge in transcription and annotation systems such as SAMPA, IPA and ToBI.

 
Education/Experience:

• Bachelor’s degree in linguistics, language technologies, computational linguistics, speech science, or related field.

 
Interview Policy:

• Please note that the use of assisted AI tools during the interview process is strictly prohibited and is grounds for immediate disqualification.