Linguistics Expert

Purpose of the Role: Linguistics Expert

As a Linguistics Expert, you will serve as a highly experienced professional consultant on AI training data projects for leading AI model builders and enterprises. Your primary focus will involve defining success criteria, reviewing outputs, and providing targeted guidance to enhance quality and speed. This role directly contributes to the successful delivery of domain-specific annotated datasets that adhere to the highest technical standards. You will be engaged on specific projects with clearly defined deliverables, milestones, and end dates.

Key Components and Responsibilities

Technical Standard Setting, Quality Control, and Process Improvement

• Define domain-specific quality success metrics, such as accuracy of transcription, consistency in linguistic annotation schemes, phonetic transcription accuracy, adherence to grammatical frameworks, and correct use of linguistic markup standards (e.g., IPA or Universal Dependencies).
• Develop project-specific Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), Quality Assurance (QA) rubrics, and comprehensive reference materials to meet client technical standards.
• Review project outputs, including transcriptions, annotations, and language datasets, against established technical standards, ensuring defects are flagged and corrected before client delivery.
• Perform structured QA passes on daily and weekly deliverables, swiftly identifying, tracking, and resolving defects to meet delivery deadlines.
• Provide precise remediation notes when returning work to contractors.
• Offer advisory input on tools, workflows, and processes to achieve stringent quality benchmarks.
• Manage specification changes and edge-case scenarios, such as the annotation of rare dialects or ambiguous language constructs, by drafting acceptance criteria or workarounds.
• Curate example libraries of “gold standard” linguistic data for calibration and comparability to agreed reference samples.

Talent Vetting & Output Improvement

• Participate in vetting and assessing technical contractor talent for specific projects, which includes evaluating transcription accuracy and linguistic annotation skills.
• Review sample work from contractors and provide precise, actionable written feedback to improve their outputs.
• Create targeted training or calibration resources, such as phonetic transcription guidelines, morphological analysis instructions, and disambiguation procedures.

Project Delivery Support

• Advise on technical scoping and requirements during project setup, including the selection of appropriate annotation frameworks and language coverage specifications.
• Provide expert guidance for edge cases, technical exceptions, and specification changes.
• Contribute to post-project reviews to capture lessons learned and continuously improve future standards.
• Identify and summarize client model observations and insights, such as frequent misannotations or language-specific bias patterns.
• Build dashboards or trackers with defect categories and recurrence to surface production insights that enhance project outcomes.
• Conduct post-mortems, analyze defect trends, and propose process tweaks or training refreshers.

Target Profile for a Linguistics Expert

We are looking for candidates with:

• An advanced degree (ideally PhD) in Linguistics, Applied Linguistics, or a closely related field, with demonstrable research or industry impact.
• 5+ years of professional expertise in linguistic analysis, annotation standards, and language data quality control.
• Proven ability to set, enforce, and maintain high technical standards in linguistic data creation projects.
• Strong communication skills for delivering clear technical guidance.
• Experience producing technical documentation, quality rubrics, or training resources.
• Ability to work effectively within fixed project timelines and scope.
• Strong attention to detail, documentation discipline, and commitment to accuracy and consistency.
• Fluency in spoken and written English, with additional language proficiency preferred.

Example Data Annotation - Potential Scope

The role may involve working across various linguistic fields:

• Linguistics: Register/genre fit enforcement, dialect fidelity, orthography consistency.
• Sociolinguistics: Dialect/register policy setting, code-switch handling.
• Phonetics & Phonology: Transcription accuracy, disfluency policy, prosodic annotation.
• Applied Linguistics: Script/orthography/romanization standards, tokenization.
• Computational Linguistics: Named entity handling, punctuation conventions.
• Corpus Linguistics: Metadata completeness, defect tracking, IAA monitoring.
• Translation & Localization: Policy compliance checking, edge-case arbitration.
• Language Technology: Validator creation (regex/scripts), automation of QA checks.
• Psycholinguistics: Prompt/script design, scenario coverage.
• Language Documentation: Gold-standard library curation, reviewer calibration.
• Language Studies: Multiscript/multimodal transcription QA.

Work Arrangement & Compensation

This is a contract position offering a pay range of $25 to $100 per hour. The exact rate will be determined based on your experience, expertise, and geographic location. As a contractor, you will be responsible for supplying a secure computer and high-speed internet. Company-sponsored benefits such as health insurance and PTO do not apply.

Key skills/competency

• Linguistic Annotation
• AI Training Data
• Quality Assurance
• Technical Standards
• Project Management
• SOP Development
• Data Curation
• Feedback & Training
• Natural Language Processing
• Computational Linguistics