DragoRadev: New page: Report on NACLO NACLO is the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (http://www.naclo.cs.cmu.edu). It is one of about 25 national lingusitics Olympiads in various countrie...

2013-07-22T10:47:51Z

New page: Report on NACLO NACLO is the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (http://www.naclo.cs.cmu.edu). It is one of about 25 national lingusitics Olympiads in various countrie...

New page

Report on NACLO

NACLO is the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad
(http://www.naclo.cs.cmu.edu). It is one of about 25 national
lingusitics Olympiads in various countries, whose winners compete in the
annual International Linguistics Olympiad (http://www.ioling.org).

Although there are many countries that have linguistics Olympiads, we
are reporting here only on NACLO because it is the only one that truly
focuses on computational linguistics in addition to linguistics.

NACLO is open to high school and middle school students in the US and
Canada. There is no prerequisite knowledge or entrance requirement.

NACLO program committee activities: Program Chair Dragomir Radev
collected 40+ problem ideas from an international program committee of 28
people. The problems were reviewed by other program committee members
and were tested by college students. Eight problems were selected
for the open round of NACLO. Three of the eight problems were
computational, covering Huffman Coding, context free grammars, and a
type of two dimensional grid for representing phrase structure in a way
that disambiguates attachment ambiguities. Six problems were selected
for the invitational round, two of which were computational, covering an
Eliza-like chat bot and decision trees. The remaining problems are
implicitly computational in that they exercise pattern recognition,
establishing and pruning a large search space of possible solutions, and
multi-step analytical thinking.

NACLO participation: Over 1400 students particpated in NACLO this
year. The students participate at about 45 university host sites, or
at their high schools. Each university host site does local outreach and
publicity.

NACLO funding: NAACL has become a regular funder of NACLO,
contributing $5000 per year for the last few years. The Linguistic
Society of America also contributes $5000 per year. This year, the
Feldberg Family Foundation used their personal frequent flyer miles to
purchase plane tickets for ten NACLO participants to attend the IOL.
(The Feldberg Family Foundation also endows a chair for James
Pustejovsky, one of the NACLO organizers.) Brandeis University
Computer Science Department also donated $5000 this year. There were
also many smaller donations from individuals and businesses.

NACLO funding is used for maintaining the web site, paying graders and
problem testers, and travel to the international contest.

NACLO organizational plans: NACLO plans to enter into a three way
letter of understanding with LSA and NAACL, outlining the resources that
each group will contribute including funding and publicity among other
things.

NACLO requests that universities establish internships for NACLO
graduates while they are in high school or when they are in college.
This will help encourage them to enter our field. CMU's Language
Technologies Institute has offered summer internships to at least five
NACLO graduates and finds them to be surprisingly productive for their
age (18-20 years old). Contact Lori Levin (lsl@cs.cmu.edu) for more
information.

NACLO Organizers:

Mary Jo Bensasi, Administrative Assistant, Carnegie Mellon University
Adam Hesterberg, Assistant Coach, Ph.D. Student, Math, MIT
Lori Levin, Co-chair, Carnegie Mellon University
Patrick Littell, Canadian coach, Ph.D. Student, Linguistics, UBC
Graham Morehead, Web site, student, CS, University of Maine
James Pustejovsky, Sponsorship Chair, Brandeis University
Dragomir Radev, Program Chair, US Head Coach, University of Michigan

2013Q3 Reports: Linguistics Olympiads 2012 - Revision history

DragoRadev: New page: Report on NACLO NACLO is the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (http://www.naclo.cs.cmu.edu). It is one of about 25 national lingusitics Olympiads in various countrie...