Hey everyone, hope u r doing well!

So I obtained an MA in English literature from Hungary (Stipendium Hungaricum)

I have always been passionate by research and would like to pursue a PhD but I realized that literature isn't what I want. I want something more practical, o I am studying another MA in linguistics in my home country.

For my PhD I'd like to transition to something a bit more technical, preferably as technical as possible. I heard about computational linguistics and NLP as the best options for people in my situation. Do you guys have advice please? Where should I start?

Context: I come from a linguistics background and have several years of experience in my specialty within the field. I passed the first round of interviews for an EdTech learning company for a high-ish level role. They gave me an "assignment" to see how I would handle what I assume are issues they are facing regarding scoring, mapping of scores, comparisons, etc.

The assignment has multiple parts and I have been explicitly asked for all of my thinking regarding my choices--whys, why nots, deep explanations, etc. Essentially, they want me to show all of my steps.

I'm not even halfway done, and this "assignment" has taken several hours and is multiple pages.

Having not experienced this before, I'm concerned that this ask from the company is more so them fishing for information they can feed into an AI. Are assignments of this scale common within the EdTech and Language Tech arena?

Hello all!

I graduated earlier this year with a MS in Human Language Technology from UA. I mention the school because the program is heavily focused on giving students practical, job-like experience. I completed an internship during which I worked on a live project and had the opportunity to present at the Language Technology for All conference in France last year. In addition, I have professional experience in language technology, primarily in text chatbot work that was more manual (e.g. working with patterns that are manually programmed and not inferred using ML) as well as experience with AI and Data Analysis. I have had an impossible time finding a job that is actually relevant and I would really like some advice.

Currently, I am on contract at Meta as a DLA, though I have been tasked with more complex linguistics work, specifically reporting on results of assessments and creating assessment guidelines for various models, both text and voice.

Is there a place I am not looking? I will share my docs in the comments.