Zina Pozen is a 2012 CLMS candidate. In this interview, Zina discusses how her love of linguistics drew her to the program and how she’s already applied the program to her work.

Zina Pozen

What is your educational and professional background?

I hold a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science from NYU. For 16 years, I have worked as a developer across the software industry, from small startups to Microsoft, where I’ve contributed code to five Windows releases. However, before I became a software engineer, I studied linguistics at Moscow State University for two very intense and exciting years. I took classes in phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. I also had a good introduction to historical linguistics with Old Slavonic and Old Russian languages.

Why did you decide to take a continuing education program?

Given my background, I had always secretly hoped that I would return to linguistics one day, while leveraging my CS expertise. The huge surge of interest in computational methods in linguistics in the last decade, proliferation of unstructured data on the Web, readily available storage and computing, and effectiveness of statistical approaches have come together to create a Natural Language Processing renaissance, and I knew I wanted to be a part of it.

Why did you choose the CLMS program in particular?

It was love at first sight. One evening, I was sitting at home and the trapped inner linguist in me somehow got this idea that I should check if UW has a Master’s program in Computational Linguistics. Within seconds I was on the program’s website and within minutes I knew I wanted to enroll. The program offered classes that fit my interests and had strong industry ties. Plus, it was right here in Seattle and I could take classes online if I needed to.

Have you taken advantage of attending courses online?

I took one class, Shallow Processing Techniques for Natural Language Processing, almost entirely online – between the amount of homework and my busy job schedule, I couldn’t afford to spend any time commuting. I found that I actually focus on the presentation better when taking the class online. Even though I live in Seattle and am very close to the UW campus, I value the flexibility of the online option. I like that even as a non-online student if I need to travel I can still attend my classes online, or watch the recorded lecture later if I have to.

What types of projects have you and your cohort worked on?

For the seminar I took on Ontologies and Information Extraction I created an ontology of Windows diagnostic messages, and experimented with several approaches to extract information from the event message text and automatically classify them.

For the Introduction to Linguistic Phonetics course this year, CLMS students were given an interesting option to describe the phonology of a language we were not familiar with, and predict the kinds of errors an automatic speech recognition system trained in North American English would make when processing that language. I had a lot of fun with Georgian phonology and was quite thrilled when many of my predictions actually realized!

Were you able to apply this program to your current job?

I started the program while still working full-time at Microsoft in the Windows Division, and tried to integrate my work and school endeavors as much as I could – my seminar project was one example. Another text-processing related project at work was anonymizing performance events collected on Windows machines before they are sent back to Microsoft to analyze performance bottlenecks.

What are your future career goals?

My goal right now is to build a solid foundation for doing text and language processing work, and I feel that I am learning all the right things to make that leap. After graduating, I want to avoid falling back into the generic software development I had been doing for so long. The majority of my work at Microsoft, while exciting, was not very CL-oriented. For example, I was responsible for implementing the application suspend-resume transitions for Windows 8 Metro apps. As soon as Windows 8 Beta was unveiled, I actually quit my job to finish my CLMS program as a full-time student.

Any advice for future students?

I highly recommend reaching out to fellow students – it’s a great bunch of talented, enthusiastic language and technology geeks!

Read more student profiles »