– What are the most important aspects of your job?
– At the moment I have three jobs. I do quite different work in the three jobs, but they are all relevant to my studies.
I work full-time at Cerence, where I am working on a voice assistant for cars. My area of responsibility is natural language understanding (NLU). In other words, I make sure that the assistant understands what the user wants, so that it can perform the specific requested actions, such as turning on a fan or playing music. I do this by writing so-called ”grammars”, partly in code. Grammars consist of different types of rules that determine how the user’s utterances should be understood, and these generally need to be written and maintained by linguists.
Since 2018, I have also worked as a historical language consultant on HBO Nordic’s Beforeigners, a Norwegian science-fiction series produced by Rubicon. The series is about time migrants from the past, called Beforeigners, who come from three different eras: the Stone Age, the Viking Age and the 19th century. I have been in charge of the language from the latter period. My job involves adapting the lines of the 19th century characters to ensure they sound as authentic as possible. I have worked closely with the screenwriters and the actors, to ensure the best possible end result on screen.
In addition, I have a part-time position as a transcriber for the National Library’s Norwegian Language Bank, which is a resource for use in research and in language technology development.
– What do you like best about your job?
– In all three jobs, I have the opportunity to use my language skills in very different ways: from analysing speech and building logical systems in software to reaching a wide audience with a creative piece of language work in Beforeigners. I enjoy working with a lot of very talented people, all of whom help make my work better. I also like the fact that I can work on and finish several small, varied tasks every day, which I find very satisfying. It is also great to know that, in addition to enjoying my work, I am also helping lots of other people, who in some way or other benefit from what I have done.
– How are the studies offered by the Faculty of Humanities relevant to your job?
– My studies in linguistics have shown me the breadth of language as a discipline – a perspective that is absolutely essential in all my jobs. Although coding grammars is quite different to trying to recreate a dialect that has not been spoken for 150 years, my studies have given me the foundation to be able to resolve all these problems. An important part of this foundation is the various different analytical skills I learned, such as a critical approach to different types of data, which I use every day to improve my own and others’ work.
– What is the best advice you can give new students who are wondering about job opportunities available to them after graduation?
– Get to know people on your course, and say yes to all kinds of opportunities that arise at the university and elsewhere – academic and social. My network has told me about job opportunities and provided me with good references, giving me the opportunity to do more with linguistics than I ever imagined. The linguistics environment in Norway is quite small, so knowing people is an advantage!
André Nilsson Dannevig
Dicipline:
Linguistics
Grade:
Master's
Graduation HF:
2016
Position:
Natural language understanding specialist, historical language consultant and transcriber
Employer:
Cerence Inc. (cerence.com), Rubicon TV AS (rubicon.no), The National Library (nb.no)