North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad
Download flyerIn February 2008, the School of Information Technology and Engineering at the University of Ottawa will be hosting a local Open Competition site for the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NACLO). The goal of this event is to expose high-school students to linguistics and to increase general awareness of linguistics as an academic discipline. In the competition, students solve analysis problems drawn widely from the world's languages. The problems require only general reasoning skills, but no special knowledge of linguistics or languages.
Linguistics is not usually introduced in high school, and that is why students who enter university are often not aware of it as a possible course of study. Linguistics is the general study of language. It addresses such questions as the properties that languages have in common; how language is learned, produced and understood; how languages change through time and vary across geographic regions or social strata; and the design of language technologies such as speech recognition, machine translation and information retrieval.
The Olympiad is a North American competition. Interested students can participate in the local competition at the University of Ottawa. The competition will be held on February 5th, 2008, 10 am. - 1 pm., in the Colonel By building, room A707, 161 Louis Pasteur.
Register for the contest on-line with the central organization at: www.naclo.cs.cmu.edu. The site has both rules and practice problems for students to review, and more details about the event.
We will be holding an information and practice session on Wednesday, January 23rd, 2008, 5 - 7 pm. at the University of Ottawa, Colonel By building, 161 Louis Pasteur, room A707. To sign up for this (optional) session, send email to: diana@site.uottawa.ca.
NACLO is currently sponsored by the US National Science Foundation, Google, the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and Cambridge University Press. Top scorers in the Open Competition on February 5th will be eligible to compete in an Invitational Competition on March 11th, 2008. Winners of the Invitational Competition will be eligible to compete in the International Linguistics Olympiad in Bulgaria.
We have enclosed flyers that advertise the event; please distribute them or otherwise pass on the information to interested teachers and students as you consider appropriate. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us at: diana@site.uottawa.ca.
Sincerely,
The organizing committee
Professors: Diana Inkpen, Stan Szpakowicz
Graduate students: Oana Frunza, Aminul Islam, Alistair Kennedy