The winners in the Fourth Annual North American Computational Linguistics Competition have been announced. The top eight scorers were:
1st- Ben Sklaroff, Palo Alto, CA, Palo Alto High School
2nd- Brian Kong, Milton, MA, Milton Academy
3rd- Allen Yuan, Farmington Hills, MI, Detroit Country Day School
4th- Daniel Li, Fairfax, VA, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology
5th- Alan Chang, San Jose, CA
6th- Alexander Iriza, Astoria, NY, The Dalton School
7th- In-Sung Na, Old Tappan, NJ, Northern Valley Regional HIgh School at Old Tappan
8th- Tian-Yi Damien Jiang, Raleigh, NC, North Carolina School of Science & Mathematics (Durham)
1,118 students participated in the first round of the competition, held on February 4, and the top 100 scorers took part in a second round on March 10. Squads formed from the best-scoring participants will be eligible to go on to the Eighth International Linguistics Olympiad, to be held in Sweden in July. NACLO winners have done very well in previous Olympiads.
According to the press release,
Students compete in the Computational Linguistics Olympiad by solving challenging problems using data from a variety of languages and formal systems. There is no pre-requisite knowledge. Students discover facts about languages and formal systems in the course of solving the puzzles. This year students solved a total of 16 problems, including deciphering the rules for a Pig-Latin-like play language in Minangkabau, the writing systems of Plains Cree, and the Vietnamese classic Tale of Kieu written in Chinese characters. Computational problems dealt with text compression and automatic expansion of abbreviated words.
For those interested in more detail, the NACLO website gives the problems from previous years. For example, the first problem in the invitational round of the 2009 competition involved figuring out a shift-reduce parser for the button presses in P-Little’s Triple-I XTreem Hyp()th3tica7 Sk8boarding Game; the second one involves decoding Linear B; and the third one requires you to figure out some aspects of Bulgarian morphology.
The NACLO website also explains the history:
The idea of holding academic Challenges in linguistics stems from a long tradition of linguistics and mathematics competitions, which began in Moscow in the 1960s. In 1984, Bulgaria began holding similar competitions, and contests were first held in the United States at the University of Oregon starting in 1998. Bulgaria hosted the First International Olympiad in Linguistics in Borovetz in September of 2003, and subsequent International Olympiads have been held in Moscow, Russia in 2004, Leiden, The Netherlands in 2005, and in Tartu, Estonia in 2006. More recently, universities in Estonia, Finland, Netherlands, the United States, and other countries have begun sponsoring such outreach activities aimed at high school students. Participating as individuals and in country teams, students are given challenging sets of language data and language puzzles to solve, with the chance to win prizes and international recognition. Students learn about the richness, diversity and systematicity of language, while exercising natural logic and reasoning skills. No prior knowledge of languages or linguistics is necessary, but the competitions have proven very successful in attracting top students to study in the field of linguistics and computational linguistics.
The North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad picks up on this long tradition, with a focus on computational thinking as it relates to solving linguistics problems. In addition to the traditional linguistics problems, NAMCLO endeavors to introduce students to computational problem solving as it relates specifically to natural language data.
The people mainly responsible for creating this excellent institution are Lori Levin and Drago Radev.