At the end of January 2016 (Jan 28),
the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of
Ottawa will be hosting a local Open Round competition of the North American
Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NACLO). This event is meant to expose
high-school students to linguistics, and to increase general awareness of
linguistics as an academic discipline. In the competition, students solve
analytical problems drawn widely from the world's languages. The problems
require only general reasoning skills, but no special knowledge of linguistics
or languages. Instructions will be written in English.
Linguistics is not usually
introduced at the high-school level, so students who enter college are often
unaware of it as a choice. 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.
NACLO is held in the USA and in
Canada. Ottawa-area students can participate at the local competition site at
the University of Ottawa (or at their school if it chooses to become a site).
The competition will be held on January 28, 2016, during three hours, 10 am to
1 pm.
Students can register for the
contest online with the central North American organization: http://www.naclo.cs.cmu.edu/. This
principal NACLO site has rules and practice problems for students to review,
and all details about the event. See practice problems at http://www.naclo.cs.cmu.edu/practice.html
NACLO is currently sponsored by the
US National Science Foundation, Google, the North American Chapter of the
Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), and Cambridge University
Press. Top scorers in the Open Round in January will be eligible to compete in
an Invitational Round in March. Winners of that competition will be eligible to
participate in the International Linguistics Olympiad (ILO).
We have enclosed flyers advertising
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
.
The organizing committee
Professors: Diana Inkpen
Graduate students: Diman Ghazi, Colette Joubarne