Ricardo Romero Sanchez

Employer & Current Position: Analytical Linguistic Project Manager at Google via Artech Information Systems

Program: M.A. English: Linguistics

I am a linguist on the Google Assistant team. My role involves developing and evaluating machine-learned grammar models for Natural Language Understanding (NLU) systems. I write, review, and debug code as I implement semantic models with a data-driven approach.

Identifying patterns and hypothesizing solutions for multilingual problems helps me do my job at Google. I often use skills I have developed as a graduate student and researcher at San Francisco State University.

SF State has been a space of discovery, exploration, and experimentation for me. Courses on phonology, morphology, and syntax provided me with the foundations of linguistic data analysis, which then I applied to historical linguistics and linguistic fieldwork, and transfer to my current job.

Early in my graduate studies at State, I joined the Corpus, Experimental and Computational Linguistics Lab, where I assisted in research on language development, adjectival word order, and search query language. While participating in this research, I explored programming languages such as Python and R as tools for linguistic research. SF State's graduate seminars on semantic theory and discourse analysis also provided me with the opportunity to apply corpus and computational methods to topics such as semantic similarity and the language of apologies.

Seeking more familiarity with formal and mathematical approaches to language, I took psychological statistics and formal logic at State and attended the 2017 Linguistic Society of America Summer Linguistic Institute (LSA) at the University of Kentucky (UK). During my time at UK I was exposed to corpus building, machine translation, and statistical modeling.

All in all, linguistics at State, the LSA, and Google has been an exhilarating experience full of personal and professional growth for me. My classmates and professors at State, the community of linguists at the LSA, and my colleagues at Google all have taught me valuable lessons that shape who I am and what I do as a linguist.