The North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NACLO)
NACLO is an international contest in which middle school and high school students solve linguistics puzzles. No prior knowledge of linguistics or languages in necessary to solve the problems - just logic skills.
Professionals in linguistics and language technologies create engaging problems for the Olympiad using dozens of the world's languages. The competition attracts top students, many of whom chose later on to study and work in the field.
Interested?
- Try out some graded practice problems here and some problems from prior national and international olympiads here.
- Read about linguistics and computational linguistics
- Explore the world's languages on the web
Competition Dates
- Open Round: The Open Round competition is on Thursday, January 30, 2014, 9:00 am - 12:00 pm. Seattle-area students will compete at the University of Washington Seattle Campus. Tacoma-area students will compete at the Tacoma School District's Professional Development Center. NOTE: THE UW SEATTLE CAMPUS SITE IS NOW FULL. THE TACOMA SITE IS STILL OPEN.
- Invitational Round: The Invitational Round competition will take place on Thursday, March 13, 2014. The top 100 Open Round performers nationwide will be invited to participate.
- International Olympiad: Eight students will be selected to represent the United States at the 12th International Linguistics Olympiad to be held in Beijing, China in July 2014.
Registration
The NACLO registration site is: www.naclo.cs.cmu.edu. On the second page of the registration form select University Site and the University of Washington as the Contest Site irrespective of whether you will compete at the Seattle or the Tacoma contest site.
Local Arrangements
In the Seattle and Puget Sound area, NACLO is organized by the Department of Linguistics at the University of Washington. The local organizer is Jim Hoard. You can contact him by email at jim_hoard@hotmail.com.
NACLO 2014 is sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the Linguistic Society of America, the Army Research Lab, the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Michigan, the University of Pittsburgh Intelligent Systems Program, and the Carnegie Mellon Leonard Gelfand Center for Service Learning and Outreach.