NACLO competition introduces students to computational linguistics
The Department of Computer Sciences will host local high-school and middle-school participants in the 2010 North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NACLO) open competition.
On Thursday, Feb. 4, analytically minded high-school and middle-school students will gather at more than 100 host sites around the United States to compete for a spot at the invitational the following month and, eventually, an invitation to the International Linguistics Olympiad in Uppsala, Sweden.
Competitors will have three hours to solve approximately four linguistic puzzles that challenge them to think logically and computationally to decipher texts in rare languages.
“We want to attract top students to study and work in fields such as computational linguistics and language technologies,” says computer sciences assistant professor Xiaojin Zhu, who is organizing the UW–Madison site with computer sciences graduate student Nate Fillmore. “The university actually has expertise in this area, and so that’s also one way to get the students to see just a little bit of what’s going on inside the university.”
The competition begins at 9 a.m. in the Computer Sciences Building, 1210 W. Dayton St. Participants should arrive a half-hour early.
Though the competition is designed for high-school students, middle-school students and younger are also welcome to participate. A special mention will be awarded to the highest-scoring middle-school student.
No prior knowledge or experience is necessary in linguistics, computer science, programming or foreign languages. There is no participation fee.
Online registration is open. Students can also find practice problems on this site. The deadline for early registration is Wednesday, Jan. 20. The final deadline is 11 a.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 3.
More information about the UW–Madison site can be found online.
NACLO anticipates it will finish scoring the tests three weeks after the open. The top scores in the country will be eligible to participate in the invitational on Wednesday, March 10, when the winners will return to their original sites to take the second exam.
The competition is sponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation, Google, the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and Cambridge University Press.
