WHAT DOES A COMPUTATIONAL LINGUIST DO?

Updated: Dec 26, 2024 - The Computational Linguist conducts user research and experiments to ensure solutions address user needs, providing qualitative and quantitative studies for product and marketing teams. This role involves content opportunities identified to educate users, craft marketing materials, and drive consensus with stakeholders while delivering high-quality work in a dynamic environment. The linguist also collaborates with engineers and other team members to enhance natural language processing code, innovate new features, and improve linguistic resources for speech recognition and synthesis.

A Review of Professional Skills and Functions for Computational Linguist

1. Computational Linguist Overview

  • User Advocacy: Be the voice and advocate of users to represent their best interests.
  • Research Strategy: Work with product management, product design, and development leadership to prioritize research needs, drive research strategy, and define the research roadmap.
  • Research Methodology: Analyze and determine the appropriate research methodology and develop research/test plans to achieve stakeholders goals.
  • Design Facilitation: Facilitate design sprints and workshops with designers, product managers, engineers, and other stakeholders on envisioning exercises grounded in research insights.
  • Testing Methodologies: Employ a variety of test methodologies such as Standard Usability Testing, Comparative Testing, Rapid Iterative Testing, Prototype Testing, Concept Validation, and Benchmarking.
  • Cross-Platform Research: Conduct research across multiple platforms and cross-channel including desktop, tablet, mobile web, and mobile.
  • Usability Testing: Utilize remote, unmoderated usability test platforms to rapidly turn around concurrent tests.
  • Insight Communication: Create well-written deliverables that provide succinct and actionable insights.
  • Collaborative Development: Collaborate (and lead/facilitate collaboration) with Product Managers, other Designers, Analysts, and Developers throughout the discovery, design, and development process.
  • Design Trends Knowledge: Know current digital design trends, user-centered design principles, UX best practices, heuristics, and service design methods.

2. Computational Linguist Job Description

  • User Identification: Identify target user and associated criteria needed for recruiting.
  • Team Interface: Interface with team members in the home office, back office, and the field.
  • Research Facilitation: Facilitate/moderate user-centered design research activities such as Interviews, Usability Testing, Focus Groups, Card Sorting, Contextual Inquiry, Ethnography, Discovery Sessions, and/or Surveys.
  • Note Contribution: Contribute towards note-taking for user research activities where you are not the moderator.
  • Meeting Scheduling: Take responsibility for scheduling meetings.
  • Guide Creation: Contribute to and/or create discussion guides.
  • Result Analysis: Analyze results from user research and present recommendations to various audiences.
  • Design Communication: Communicate ideas via design (i.e., whiteboard drawings, paper sketches, etc.).
  • Effort Management: Juggle multiple user research efforts at once and track and communicate them appropriately.
  • Research Planning: Plan, design, and organize research efforts, understand and incorporate complex technical and business requirements into research.

3. Computational Linguist Functions

  • User Engagement: Maintain an active, engaged user group through the digital hub.
  • Content Creation: Write and post engaging content to drive user interaction.
  • Event Coordination: Work with marketing to execute regular meetups and user events.
  • Market Research: As a member of the UX team, conduct market and customer research to support product definition.
  • User Communication: Participate in outbound physical and digital communications to the user community.
  • Investment Feedback: Provide feedback and input into key investment decisions based on community input.
  • Product Testing: Work with product colleagues to test and validate software releases with the community.
  • Concept Validation: Test and validate concepts with the user community.
  • User Testing: Take responsibility for executing user testing.
  • Research Methods Knowledge: Have a strong understanding of the strengths and shortcomings of different research methods.

4. Computational Linguist Accountabilities

  • Estimate and Plan Creation: Create estimates and project plans related to UX research efforts for moderately complex projects.
  • Independent Research: Independently perform research to gather end-user requirements.
  • Journey Mapping: Create journey maps, personas, user scenarios, and research objectives that align with project and business goals.
  • Process Improvement: Identify and improve upon process inefficiencies through applied measurement.
  • Iterative Evaluation: Independently plan, conduct, and facilitate iterative evaluations of user-interface designs (usability testing, mockup interviews, heuristic reviews, qualitative and quantitative measures).
  • Process Refinement: Assist in defining and refining UX research processes and promote the importance of such activities to ensure execution.
  • Research Partnership: Partner with other research teams, such as analytics and market research, to create and execute an overall strategy.
  • Design and Analysis: Create designs and materials to be used during analysis to meet user needs and satisfaction levels.
  • Customer Research: Conduct research with the customer, prospect, and banker audiences across the entire product development process, varying in approach, scale, scope, timeframe, and methodology.
  • Cross-Functional Collaboration: Collaborate cross-functionally with product management, project management, business analysts, design, user experience, and delivery.
  • Technical Setup Management: Manage technical setup for in-person lab interviews.

5. Computational Linguist Job Summary

  • User Research Support: Support the user research activities to deeply understand the needs of Moxie's users.
  • Rapid Experimentation: Conduct rapid experiments to ensure the solutions designed address the desired user needs and use cases.
  • Team Collaboration: Be in charge of accompanying the product, marketing, and strategy teams by providing both qualitative and quantitative studies crafted directly with users.
  • Content Development: Write and identify content opportunities to help educate users and propose best practices.
  • Marketing Copywriting: Craft marketing materials and advertisement copy to appeal to key USPs and value propositions determined through quantitative and qualitative research.
  • Stakeholder Collaboration: Collaborate with, influence, and drive consensus with stakeholders and elicit their feedback.
  • Dynamic Work Execution: Complete high-quality work in a fast-paced, dynamic work environment.
  • Team Development: Work together with engineers and other team members to develop natural language processing code specific to the language.
  • Innovative Input: Provide input and suggestions towards innovating new approaches and new product features tailored to the home market.
  • Data Analysis: Evaluate and analyze data quality and improve linguistic resources by using case templates and expansions, non-terminals, and dictionaries for speech recognition and speech synthesis.
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