Melanie Tosik, Computational Linguistics undergrad student from Berlin, spent her summer at Textkernel interning in the ‘Textractor’ team, Textkernel’s R&D department. She looks back at her summer at Textkernel and tells about her experiences.
What did you do during your summer internship ?
“The main task during the internship was to improve upon the Extract! CV Parsing software, which automatically converts resumes or social media profiles into structured candidate profiles. Specifically, I worked on improving our models’ ability to extract important information from the document, such as name and address of an applicant, details about his or her career, education, or skills. We advanced a novel approach to solve this problem for any language, and obtained very promising results that have been implemented in the latest release of Extract! CV Parsing.”
What have you learned through this experience?
“My previous professional experience was limited to student assistantships in different projects at my home university in Potsdam. I found the industrial application of state-of-the-art techniques to large data sets greatly enhanced and complemented my university studies, and I genuinely enjoyed contributing towards the commercial products of a contemporary NLP company.
I learned that software development is in fact something I might do on a daily basis, and nothing to be afraid of. Since my undergraduate course does not attach particular importance to programming at large scale, it was encouraging to find that with a little help and guidance, it was still possible to successfully complete the project within the intended time. Of course I also gained a lot of practical insights: coordinating a team of developers and ambitious schedules, revision control, a great deal of programming exercise in both familiar and previously unknown languages.”
How was your overall experience with Textkernel?
“Spending the summer at Textkernel was inspiring and enjoyable. The company culture was as innovative as it is unconventional, and the team spirit was thoroughly characterised by the ambition and open-mindedness of its members. Regular tech talks, tutorials, and reading groups gave additional variety to the challenging work. A lively Friday drinks tradition topped off the usual 8 hour workday , that, thankfully, did not usually start before 9:30am. Finally, Textkernel paid a competitive salary for the entire period, and additionally provided generous funding for trips to Rotterdam and Dublin, allowing me to participate in the Textkernel innovation week and a major NLP conference.”
What are your plans for the future?
“For the near future, I have decided to sustain academia a little longer. I have always felt that my strengths lie in theoretical studies, and since I would very much like to combine studying and performing individual research on my own, I am currently preparing applications for graduate schools in both Europe and the United States.”
Would you recommend an internship at Textkernel?
“I hope it became obvious that I would definitely recommend an internship at Textkernel. If you find yourself interested in the extensive field of semantic recruitment technology, and if you would like to join an international team focusing on real-world applications of computational linguistics, do not hesitate to submit an application. From what I have heard, Textkernel now also empowers mobile recruiting, so you can start right away!”
Interested in doing an internship at Textkernel?
