The North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad has been announced for 2009. It’s a great outreach program to high school students to increase interest in general and computational linguistics. I’ve talked about it before here. I have reproduced the announcement below the jump.
The first round of the 2009 North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad will be held on February 4, 2009. There are multiple opportunities to get involved: 1. by hosting a local site where local high school students will compete, 2. by submitting problems to the jury, and 3. by getting involved with the NACLO organization. Please consider these options. For more information, read below.
Drago
1. Hosting a NACLO site
The Organizing Committee of NACLO, the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad, invites you to become involved in our 2009 contest as a local site coordinator! NACLO is a fun (and educational!) contest for U.S. and Canadian high-school students in which contestants compete to solve compelling and creative puzzles in linguistics and computational linguistics. Requiring no previous knowledge of linguistics, languages, or computing, these puzzles can be solved by analytic reasoning alone, and serve as a fun introduction to a field to which many high school students have never been introduced.
The Open Round competition will take place on February 4, 2009 at universities and high schools across the U.S. and Canada. The winners proceed to the Invitational Round (to take place on March 11, 2009), where they try out for a chance to compete in the 2009 International Linguistics Olympiad, to be held in Polan next summer.
NACLO is seeking site coordinators to run local contest sites for the Open Round. We’ve found running local sites to be a fun and rewarding experience for everyone involved. We’ll provide the materials and support, as well as instructions on how to coordinate a contest site. Sites have ranged from having 5 contestants to having 200; the scale is up to you.
For further information and/or to express interest in hosting a site, please contact the organizers at nacl…@umich.edu
Visit http://www.naclo.cs.cmu.edu for more details such as the rules, lists of winners from previous years, sample problems, etc. Check the section on “Site/teacher registration” for specific information about hosting a site (either high school or university site).
The deadline to register a site is October 30, 2008. After this deadline, we will still consider new site registrations if our grading capacity allows it.
Last year, we had 65 high school sites as well as 12 university sites (Columbia, Cornell, U.Penn, U.Michigan, U.Illinois, U. Wisconsin, Brandeis, SJSU, MTSU, U. Oregon, U. Toronto, U. Ottawa). We expect a much larger list this year.
2. Problem solicitation
CALL FOR PROBLEM IDEAS
2009 North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad
Deadline for problem submission: November 15, 2008
The Organizing Committee of NACLO, the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad, invites you to become involved in our 2009 contest as a problem writer.
NACLO is a fun (and educational!) contest for U.S. and Canadian high-school students in which contestants compete to solve compelling and creative puzzles in linguistics and computational linguistics. Requiring no previous knowledge of linguistics, languages, or computing, these puzzles can be solved by analytic reasoning alone, and serve as a fun introduction to a field to which many high school students have never been introduced.
The Open Round competition will take place on February 4, 2009 at universities and high schools across the U.S. and Canada. The winners proceed to the Invitational Round (to take place on March 11, 2009), where they try out for a chance to compete in the 2009 International Linguistics Olympiad, to be held in Poland next summer.
We are specifically looking for problem ideas in general linguistics (e.g., focusing on morphotactics, grammar, spelling, semantics, etc.), comparative linguistics (cross-lingual phenomena), and especially computational linguistics (here the sky is the limit). All problems should be based on real languages and real language phenomena or challenges in computational linguistics.
The problems should also be appropriate for our targeted age group (14-17 year olds). They should require only logical thinking in order to be solved.
For further information, please contact the chair of the program committee, Dragomir Radev at ra…@umich.edu
Visit http://www.naclo.cs.cmu.edu for more details such as the rules, lists of winners from previous years, sample problems, etc.
Last year, we had 65 high school sites as well as 12 university sites (Columbia, Cornell, U.Penn, U.Michigan, U.Illinois, U. Wisconsin, Brandeis, SJSU, MTSU, U. Oregon, U. Toronto, U. Ottawa). We expect a much larger list this year.
3. Help needed.
If you are interested in helping NACLO in any way, including organizationally or financially, please contact nacl…@umich.edu
Several positions on the organizing committee are still open.
