Job Description

Vietnamese Computational Linguist – NLP and Speech Technology

Location: Remote – Vietnam

Position Overview

We are seeking a Vietnamese Computational Linguist to support NLP and speech-technology projects involving grammar development, language localization, phonetics, pronunciation resources, tokenization, text normalization, and Vietnamese language variation.

This is a technical linguistics position, not a translation-only or general language annotation role. The successful candidate must have formal training or relevant professional experience in computational linguistics, natural language processing, language technology, speech technology, or a closely related field.

The ideal candidate can interpret and develop structured language grammars, analyze intent and entity patterns, localize linguistic models into Vietnamese, and explain language-specific challenges and technical solutions.

Key Responsibilities

Develop, extend, test, and localize computational grammars for Vietnamese.
Work with rule-based grammar formats such as JSGF, context-free grammars, BNF, or similar frameworks.
Create and evaluate utterance patterns containing intents, entities, slots, and alternative sentence structures.
Identify problems related to grammar coverage, ambiguity, overgeneration, and scalability.
Support the development and review of Vietnamese pronunciation dictionaries and other linguistic resources.
Work with phonetic representations and grapheme-to-phoneme conversion workflows.
Contribute to tokenization, text preprocessing, and text-normalization processes.
Analyze Vietnamese word boundaries, sentence structure, diacritics, abbreviations, slang, spelling variations, and conversational language.
Identify and document differences among Northern, Central, and Southern Vietnamese varieties.
Distinguish between formal written Vietnamese and spontaneous spoken Vietnamese.
Develop and improve linguistic guidelines, normalization rules, annotation instructions, and technical documentation.
Clearly explain linguistic decisions, language-specific complications, and recommended technical solutions.
Collaborate with NLP engineers, speech-technology specialists, project managers, and other stakeholders to ensure linguistic accuracy and consistency.

Required Qualifications

Fluent-level proficiency in Vietnamese.
Professional working proficiency in English, including the ability to understand technical instructions and explain linguistic decisions in writing.
Formal training in computational linguistics, natural language processing, language technology, speech technology, or a closely related discipline.
Practical understanding of structured or formal grammars, such as JSGF, context-free grammars, BNF, or comparable grammar systems.
Familiarity with NLP concepts such as intents, entities, slots, utterance patterns, tokenization, and normalization.
Experience with phonetics, pronunciation dictionaries, or grapheme-to-phoneme conversion.
Strong understanding of Vietnamese grammar, word boundaries, sentence structure, and diacritics.
Knowledge of abbreviations, slang, spelling variations, and conversational Vietnamese.
Understanding of Northern, Central, and Southern Vietnamese language variation.
Ability to distinguish between formal written language and spontaneous spoken language.
Strong analytical, problem-solving, and technical-writing skills.
Ability to work independently and consistently follow detailed technical specifications.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience working with JSGF or another grammar-based language framework.
Experience in ASR, NLU, conversational AI, TTS, or other speech-technology projects.
Familiarity with regular expressions, finite-state methods, or rule-based text processing.
Experience developing linguistic datasets, annotation guidelines, or language-generation rules.
Basic programming or scripting experience, preferably in Python.
Experience evaluating linguistic resources for coverage, ambiguity, accuracy, and scalability.

Technical Assessment

Shortlisted candidates will be asked to complete a technical assessment designed to evaluate their ability to:

Interpret and extend a structured language grammar.
Represent new intents and entities within the grammar.
Localize grammar rules and example utterances into Vietnamese.
Identify language-specific challenges.
Explain how the proposed approach could be scaled to support additional utterances and linguistic variation.

Candidates should be comfortable completing this type of practical computational-linguistics assessment.

Compensation

Compensation will be negotiated based on the candidate's qualifications, technical expertise, and relevant professional experience.

If your background includes hands-on computational linguistics, NLP, or speech-language technology and you meet the requirements outlined above, we invite you to submit your application for consideration.

We appreciate all applicants interest. We will contact only candidates selected for the next stage of the process.