Statistician, Programmer, Data Scientist? Who is, or Should Be, a Corpus Linguist in the 2020s?

Abstract

Abstract In this short essay, I aim to ruminate on the nature of a corpus linguist’s work in the 2020s, a time marked by unprecedented advancements in the field of computer technologies and artificial intelligence. This seems to be particularly relevant considering the theme of the 12th International Conference Slovko 2023, which is “Natural Language Processing and Corpus Linguistics”. In the last two decades or so, corpus linguistics has drawn extensively from the fields such as statistics, computer science and data science. In many respects corpus linguistics has served as a significant source of inspiration for progress in the field of natural language processing (NLP), leading to the development of large language models (LLMs) as well as recent introduction of conversational artificial intelligence, among others. Thus, in this paper I will make an attempt at identifying the skills that may help rank-and-file or aspiring corpus linguists to survive and, hopefully, flourish in the research field in the 2020s.