What's the difference between a computational linguist and a data scientist?

Question

Hello there, hope you're well! I was wondering what skills a computational linguist would lack, to be say, a data scientist in some large company or vice versa? Do they not both munge data, involve machine learning and require a competency of python, sql plus many more languages?

I code more as a newly-found obsessive hobby. I'm a linguistics student in uni, and have just come across the field of "computational linguistics". Will definitely be doing my "final year project", next year, on the topic, but not sure where to begin?

Answer 1

Hi Pat Boyle. Although I am not explicitly familiar with computational linguistics, I am with data science using R. I would imagine that the strong background most data scientists have in statistics or applied mathematics may be a distinguishing factor. Also, linguists work with language, right? Data scientists do as well, but not exclusively. So it seems as though if they do overlap, computational linguists are a 'subset' of data scientists. Have you studied natural language processing? Seems pretty interesting to someone in your position..