For the third year, the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Department of Computer Sciences will host local high-school and middle-school participants in the 2011 North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NACLO) open competition.
NACLO is a contest in which high-school students solve linguistic puzzles. In solving the problems, students learn about the diversity and consistency of language, while exercising logic skills.
No prior knowledge of linguistics or second languages is necessary. Professionals in linguistics, computational linguistics and language technologies use dozens of languages to create engaging problems that represent cutting edge issues in their fields. The competition has attracted top students to study and work in those same fields. It is an opportunity for young people to experience a taste of natural-language processing in the 21st century.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison will be a local site and will host more than 70 students. The open round of the contest will take place on Wednesday, February 2.
Well-performing students will be invited to a second round to be held on March 10. The top students in the second round will have a chance to participate in the 9th International Linguistics Olympiad, held this year for the first time in the United States.
More information about the UW-Madison site can be found at http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~nathanae/naclo/
The competition is sponsored in part by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.
The Wisconsin local hosts are graduate student Nate Fillmore, Professor Ben Snyder, and Professor Jerry Zhu, all from the Department of Computer Sciences.