How to Make Linguistics Relevant in the Digital Age

How to make Humanities and Social Sciences relevant again in the Digital Age--Enter Computational Linguistics to the Rescue

 Universities are being encouraged to emphasize STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) degrees by de-emphasizing social science and the humanities. The argument here is that STEM is where the jobs are. There is more and more emphasis for universities to spend more money on computer related disciplines than to spend money on Humanities classes because after graduation, students will be able to find high paying jobs in the computer/engineering field if they major in STEM fields than if for example, the student majored in a French Literature or Applied Linguistics.

If a university has a choice between spending its budget on a STEM discipline or a Humanities discipline, then the university would choose STEM hands down. This means that Humanities and the importance of having a Humanities/Social Sciences education is on a downward spiral. In this digital age, the tech savvy student wants a STEM major so that he/she can get that high paying engineering/computer job. Read more about how and why STEM disciplines receive more funding than Humanities/Social Science disciplines at this link: A Rising Call to Promote STEM Education and Cut Liberal Arts Funding.



How do we marry Applied Linguistics with STEM?

I majored in Applied Linguistics. Linguistics is the study of language and Applied Linguistics is the study of language and the application of Second Language Acquisition theory to Foreign Language Teaching. However, in many universities, funding for Social sciences has been slashed in favor of increasing funding for STEM programs. I say why not save the Linguistics department by marrying Applied Linguistics/Linguistics with Computational Linguistics thereby making Social Sciences a more STEM discipline? And thus, making Applied Linguistics relevant in the Digital Age.

What is Computational Linguistics?

Ever wonder how the scientists program Alexa how to talk? Ever wonder how programmers create automatic Grammar checkers like Grammarly? What about those programmers who want to teach Sophie the Robot how to talk? Well, that's where Computational Linguistics comes in.  In the future, many jobs will be automated and performed by robots. Having robots who can speak and communicate with humans will be the wave of the future. In Japan for instance, there are more old people than young people. Japanese scientists are experimenting in creating friendly talking robots to talk to/socialize/take care of old Japanese people in nursing homes. Here is a long scholarly article about robots "Toward Robotic Assistants in Nursing Homes"

If a student has a Linguistics/Applied Linguistics background, he/she would understand how/why people talk and then when you marry the study of language with computer programming--then Voila you have Computational Linguistics. Computational linguistics (CL) combines resources from linguistics and computer science to discover how human language works.Computational linguistics is a field of vital importance in the information age. Computational linguists create tools for important practical tasks such as machine translation, speech recognition, speech synthesis, information extraction from text, grammar checking, text mining and more.

Read about Computational Linguistics at this link.

University of Washington Computational Linguistics major