Well, what about text analytics? Much of what I know about natural language processing (NLP) I learned from my friend Sharon Flank, who I met when she was a Slavic Linguistics PhD student at Harvard. My partner in first figuring out search engines — and later in running Elucidate — was my wife Linda Barlow, a 15-times-published novelist who’s also taught English at the college level. And Olivier Jouve’s education is in paleontology, although whether or not that’s a humanity is a sort of borderline definitional issue.

So I ask you all: Is text analytics a fruitful area for humanities majors to find lucrative careers? All insight would be appreciated. If the news is good enough, I’ll do my part in publicizing it to university placement offices and the like.

I’ve started out by asking Attensity (David Bean) and Clarabridge (Sid Banerjee). Attensity turns out to hire humanities students most years, both as full-time employees and interns. Linguistics students are the top priority, but language students and other language-friendly types are of interest as well. David is even involved in trying to set up a computational linguistics certification program at the university where he teaches part-time. And Clarabridge, the much younger company of the two, has over the past year used humanities majors quite successfully as well, for multiple aspects of ontology-building.

Company: TEMIS
Job Title: Text Mining Consultant
Description: TEMIS Be part of an exciting new adventure!

TEMIS, leading provider of text analytics and text mining technologies in Europe, increases its North-American presence to answer the overwhelming demand from its customers in the Publishing and Life Sciences industries. TEMIS solutions help thousands of users everyday access critical business information in a timely manner, using concepts and meaning extraction, automatic classification and relationships representation. TEMIS solutions have been already been deployed by key industry players to address their information management needs in various areas. TEMIS is headquartered in Philadelphia, PA and Paris, France. For more information, please visit: www.temis.com

Mission

The Text Mining Consultant is providing functional and technical expertise during project missions in the field of information management. He/She works with TEMIS clients to successfully implement and deploy our award-winning enterprise applications by analyzing customer’s requirements with the goal to provide best-in-class information extraction capabilities.

Main Responsibilities

• Participate in project implementation
• Provide functional & technical advices to customers
• Provide all functional and technical levels of support to the PProfessional Services team, being in meetings/calls with or without customers.
• Perform detailed analysis of customers’ requirements wiith regards to TEMIS information management aspects.
• Write functional & technical specifications to match the cuustomer business requirements.
• Customize, develop and roll-out high quality software solutionss, including Skill Cartridges™, the innovative knowledge components of TEMIS solutions.
• Implement solutions at customer’s premises

Additional Responsibilities

• Contribute to consultant team organization
• Actively participate to consulting coordination meetings.
• Share knowledge and methodologies with other team members.
• Provide functional/technical expertise and workload estimate duuring project planning sessions.

Necessary Skills

• BS in Computer Science or Information Technology (MS preferred)
• 2~5 years consulting experience in Text-mining or related such as Data Mining, Business Intelligence, Document Management, Enterprise Search, Knowledge Management
• Excellent knowledge of information structuring languages (XML, …) and scripting languages (Perl, Python, …). .
• Excellent communication, interpersonal and organizational skillls.
• Ability to work in a team-oriented environment, on several projects in parallel, with short time constraints in highly demanding customer environment.
• Be autonomous, reactive, proactive and innovative in order to pprovide solutions for the clients’ business requirements.
• Experience in implementing software solutions using Java & Web (JSPs, Servlets, EJBs, …) technologies is a plus.
• Other languages (French, Spanish) a plus.

This position is open in Philadelphia, PA but involves traveling through the country for consulting missions, as well as to France for team and company meetings.

And here’s the other one.

Company: TEMIS
Job Title: Pre-sales Consultant
Description: Be part of an exciting new adventure!

TEMIS, leading provider of text analytics and text mining technologies in Europe, increases its North-American presence to answer the overwhelming demand from its customers in the Life Sciences industry. TEMIS solutions help thousands of users everyday access critical business information in a timely manner, using concepts and meaning extraction, automatic classification and relationships representation. TEMIS solutions have been already been deployed by key industry players such as Pfizer, Novartis or Sanofi-Aventis to address their information management needs in various areas. TEMIS is headquartered in Philadelphia, PA and Paris, France. For more information, please visit: www.temis.com

Mission

Assist in maximizing revenue and optimizing deal closure time by supporting the sales efforts with detailed analysis of customer requirements, the development of customer-specific value proposition and proof through functional demonstrations.

Main Responsibilities
- Provide all technical and functional levels of support to the Sales Executives, being in meetings/calls with or without customers
- Perform detailed analysis of prospective customers’ requirements in all aspects (functional, technical, …)
- Develop customer-specific value propositions based on detailed analysis
- Prepare data and/or materials for the demonstration as a proof of concept for TEMIS products, services and our specific value proposition
- Assist in the performance of demonstrations and other sales visits to clients and prospective clients
- Contribute to answering RFPs and RFIs by writing the functional and technical sections
- Provide additional support when needed throughout the company (Seminars, trade shows, and training programs)

Additional Responsibilities
- Closely work with product management to insure that generic customer requirements are properly captured, translated into features and integrated in the product roadmap.
- Participate as an active member of the product team to insure that product issues identified by the sales team are being addressed by product management.
- Stay abreast of all new product developments and always have the ‘latest and greatest’ product information to execute the sales cycle, and insure that the sales team also do
- Create and maintain a dynamic and stable demonstration environment including the latest product releases and a demo database which can be used to effectively present all aspects of TEMIS solutions.

Necessary Skills
- 2-5 years pre-sales experience in related software markets such as Business Intelligence, Document Management, Content Management, Enterprise Search, Knowledge Management
- BA/BS in relevant fields (Life Sciences or Computer Science)
- Familiarity with all aspects of Text Mining.
- Ability to work under pressure, with short time constraints in highly demanding customer environment
- Be reactive, proactive, creative and innovative in order to provide solutions for the prospective clients’ needs.
- Excellent communication and interpersonal skills.
- Strong organizational skills.