Published on 12 July 2013
I was one of the speakers at the recent Language and Communication Technologies Graduation ceremony at the University of Saarland, in which many of my good friends finally got their two year degrees. Here is the speech I gave, minus some adlibbed lines.
Hello everyone. It’s an honor for me, as the LCT student and alumni representative, to be able to stand here and talk to you - but as I’m fully aware of how hot it is in here, I’ll try to keep this brief. It was hard to format this speech - and we can tell that from the varying topics of the previous speeches. The uncanny valley, praises for Coli, and the four major challenges that face us. I’m going to try to focus on you guys and what I think CoLi is, but bear with me if it sounds a bit vague.
Going back through Nils Lenke’s talk this morning, there were several themes which I thought were worth mentioning here. One of them was the applicability of a Computational Linguistics degree - “I hired you not because of your Coli degree, but in spite of it!” I’m sure that everyone who has studied Computational Linguistics has had this crisis before when applying for a job or for a research position - am I a digital humanities scholar, or am I a computer scientist? It isn’t always clear.
I think the main area where the vagueness of our degree comes into play is in daily conversations. How many of you have been asked, “So what does a computational linguist do?” To which the standard reply, or at least mine, is “Well, google, information extraction, voice stuff, Siri…” The trouble isn’t thinking of use cases, but rather thinking of an overarching theme to those cases. Saying ‘the interface between language and computers’ may be too broad - and, in any case, one could argue that the first linguist to invent writing (before computers) was, in some sense, a language technologist. For me, the one theme that defines a computational linguist is someone who intelligently tries to understand language, by whatever means necessary.
Often, this work is under-appreciated, because we work behind the scenes. You could sum up computational linguistics as a field by HTC’s motto - ‘quietly brilliant’. We work hard trying to make things work so that normal people - users - don’t have to.
Ok, this is great speculation, but where am I going with this? What I want to draw attention to is that, first, and foremost, we’re thinkers, tinkerers, hackers, makers, and fixers - often of small pieces of code, of processes running behind the scenes.
And it is this that will carry us forward - into academia, or into business, or into other fields. The degrees being handed out today are pieces of paper - what is important is that they show that the graduates have learned to be experts at finding solutions for language problems. And I hope that, going forth from today, they utilize all of the skills they learned in these two years.
No one has ever fixed a novel problem by knowing the solution before hand - in each case, it takes ingenuity to solve problems. More, it takes education - learning how to learn, and how to solve. It takes humility to recognize that we are foolish approaching problems, but that “sucking at something is the first step towards being sort of good at something,” to quote the popular American Adventure Time. And what I want to impart here is what Steve Jobs tried to impart, in the now immortal phrase, “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”
But these thoughts are cumbersome, and, to quote Odysseus, “I am not an eloquent speaker.” So I guess that’s most of what I have to say. The last thing is this: Congratulations to the graduating class, and I wish you the best.
Thanks
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