Meet the ‘recovering linguist’ who helps run DC Natural Language Processing Meetup

Elizabeth Merkhofer describes herself on Twitter as a “recovering linguist.” That’s because she jumped ship to data science.
She’s not alone: there are almost 2,000 linguist-programmers like her in the DC Natural Language Processing Meetup (DC NLP). Merkhofer, 27, is organizing an October Hack and Tell for members to show off their work.
In collaboration with DC Hack and Tell, the event will be on Oct. 11 at 6:30 p.m. in WeWork Chinatown.
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Presenters will have five minutes to share something they’ve made, and audience members will have five minutes to ask questions, then it’s off to the next presenter.  The only requirement is that projects be related to natural language processing.
And what is natural language processing?
“What humans speak are natural languages,” Merkhofer said. “Then there’s the complexity of discourse and meaning in use. Natural language programming is how we try to deal with that using computer code.”
In other words, natural language processing is the ability for a program to understand human language. You’re probably more familiar with this than you realize.

“So search, like Google or on a shopping website or your intranet, uses NLP to normalize,” Merkhofer said.  “Predictive texting uses something called a language model to statistically estimate what word you’ll say next.”
In D.C., she says companies are currently using NLP to extract data  from documents or audio recordings.
The DC NLP Meetup was founded three years ago and now includes almost 2,000 members. Merkhofer, who lives in Arlington, joined the group in 2013 and became co-organizer in 2014. (She was also the D.C. chapter leader of Women Who Code.) She told us #DCTech was responsible for introducing her to programming during her linguistics master’s at Georgetown.
“I was writing my Master’s thesis using Twitter data and a friend, who is a DC NLP member, set me up with Python,” Merkhofer wrote in an email. “So I gather data and annotate patterns many times more efficiently.”
Coding “clicked” for her: she got a job as a data scientist working with Berico Technologies in Reston. Although she described that position as a “bit of a reach for [her] technical ability at the time,” she said it paid off.
Today, Merkhofer works as a senior computational linguist with MITRE in McLean, Va., which operates federal research projects. She hopes DC NLP can create community at the intersection of linguistics and tech.