Website Google
Minimum qualifications:
- Master’s degree in Linguistics, Library or Information Science, or related field involving data modeling, textual analysis, information organization or semantic networks, or equivalent practical experience.
- Experience with ontology development (Knowledge Graph, RDFS/OWL, SPARQL, Semantic Web or KR systems).
Preferred qualifications:
- PhD in a related field or 4 years of industry experience working with ontologies, taxonomies, schema, metadata, or content management.
- Experience working on a cross-functional team (Linguists, Engineers, Program Managers).
- Experience in e-commerce, retail, or merchandising.
- Proficiency with scripting languages, web development, or database query languages (e.g. SQL).
- Effective organizational and project management skills, with the ability to manage multiple assignments simultaneously.
About the job
Analytical Linguists work across Google to drive improvements in quality, classification, information structure, and natural language understanding and generation. As an Analytical Linguist you will work both on complex projects spanning multiple products, groups, and disciplines, and on tightly focused efforts to produce specific product components or answer specific research questions. Analytical Linguists work in many different areas and arrive with a wide variety of skills—your specialization might involve natural language processing and understanding, phonology, phonetics, syntax, semantics, ontology, program management, human subject research, experimental design, statistics, corpus linguistics, large scale data acquisition, or any combination. This team is part of some of the most groundbreaking and exciting work at Google. It’s our goal to use insights from linguistics and related fields to constantly improve our products.
Analytical Linguists work across Google to drive improvements in quality, classification, information structure, and natural language understanding and generation.
As an Analytical Linguist on the Shopping team, you will research and analyze data to develop and evolve a suite of ontologies, contributing to Google’s understanding of products for sale online and helping build a high quality shopping experience for users. You will evaluate ontology performance and quality, develop new and improved structures, and produce a wide range of new metadata and signals by applying industry standards and devising novel approaches. In this work you will partner with engineers and other linguists locally and around the world to increase and enrich Google’s semantic representations through both human and automatic methods.
Users come first at Google. Nowhere is this more important than on our Advertising & Commerce team: we believe that ads and commercial information can be highly useful to our users if, and only if, that information is relevant to what our users wish to find or do. Advertisers worldwide use Google Ads to promote their products; publishers use AdSense to serve relevant ads on their website; and business around the world use our products (like Google Shopping, and Google Wallet) to support their online businesses and bring users into their offline stores. We build and maintain the platforms that have made Google what it is today, and are constantly innovating to deliver the most effective advertising and commerce opportunities of tomorrow.
Responsibilities
- Research and analyze data to understand how users around the world perceive and think about products, their classification, and attributes in a shopping context.
- Plan, manage, and execute additions and improvements to a set of ontologies. Make nuanced, data-driven decisions to curate categories and attributes in a way that balances end-user needs with internal feasibility and requirements.
- Evaluate the quality of ontologies through both industry-standard and novel methods.
- Partner with engineers and linguists across sites to integrate Shopping’s data into other Google systems. Also collaborate with user- and merchant-facing teams to facilitate ontology usage in search, browse, and other features.
- Guide the work of a team of analysts in their implementation of ontologies and attributes.