2007 North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad

Press Release

Computational Linguistics Olympiad Brings Language to Life

Students from Ithaca, Seattle, and Arlington, MA take top honors

To most Americans, Linguistics is a foreign word, according to Dr. Lori Levin, research professor at Carnegie Mellon University and general co-chair of the newly instituted North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (www.namclo.org). In order to help enrich the general public's perception of Linguistics, and in particular Computational Linguistics, scholars and researchers from around the world have collaborated in enacting the first ever national academic competition in Linguistics for high school students in the USA.

Two students from Ithaca, NY, Rachel Zax and Ryan Musa, were the top winners in the inaugural Computational Linguistics Olympiad, which took place March 29 at Carnegie Mellon University, Brandeis University and Cornell University, as well as several remote sites nationwide. Adam Hesterberg of Seattle, Wash., and Jeffrey Lim of Arlington, Mass., ranked third and fourth, respectively. The top finishers will be invited to represent the USA to compete at the International Linguistics Olympiad this August in St. Petersburg, Russia.

The US program is sponsored by the National Science Foundation, Google, the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (www.naacl.org), and Cambridge University press. Similar programs have been taking place for over forty years in Europe, and the International competition is in its fifth year.

"Linguistics is the science of language," says Dr. Thomas Payne, of the University of Oregon, the second co-chair of the program. "Computational linguistics is the study of language using computational tools. Though not yet widely known to the general public, it is a rapidly emerging field with applications in such areas as computer search techniques, machine translation and artificial intelligence." "Usually, college students don't even hear about computational linguistics until they are well along in their undergraduate studies," said Dr. Levin. "Our hope is that competitions such as the Computational Linguistics Olympiad will identify students who have an affinity for linguistics and computational linguistics before they graduate high school and encourage them to pursue further studies at the university level." The organization also hopes to see the scientific study of languages incorporated into high school curricula.

Almost 200 middle and high school students participated in the inaugural Olympiad, solving difficult and challenging problems using data from a variety of languages the students have never learned, including problems picked deliberately to cover cross-language inference and formal and computational approaches to language. "For instance, students were asked to interpret the Hmong writing system given only a few Hmong examples with their English translations," said Dr. Payne. "Some of the problems also dealt with how computational thinking may be applied to some thorny problems in English. For example, how would you get a computer to correctly interpret a high school student's messy handwriting, or weed out the errors in a document converted from oral speech?"

Additional prize winners included Rebecca Jacobs of North Hollywood, Calif., and Michael Gottlieb of Tarrytown, NY., who tied for fifth; Mitha Nandagopalan of San Jose, Calif., and Josh Falk of Pittsburgh, Pa., who tied for seventh; and Amitte Rosenfeld and Andrew Watkins, both of Pittsburgh, who tied for ninth. The two fifth place finishers will serve as alternates for the national team. If the USA is allowed to send two teams, however, the top eight finishers will be on the two teams, with the students ties in ninth serving as alternates. Other prizes include cash and books contributed by Cambridge University Press.

Contacts:

Lori Levin, Carnegie Mellon University, lsl@cs.cmu.edu, (412) 268-6193
Thomas Payne, University of Oregon, tpayne@uoregon.edu, (541) 342-6706
Dragomir Radev, University of Michigan, radev@umich.edu, (646) 420-1367


Here is an easy sample of one type of problem students were asked to solve: Swahili of Eastern Congo (Difficulty level: Easy)

Swahili belongs to a large language family, called Bantu. Bantu languages are spoken by more than 100 million people in Southern and Eastern Africa. Swahili is the mother tongue of about 5 million people, and is the common language of trade along much of the east coast of Africa.
Your task is simple. Read the first ten Swahili words and their English translations. Then give the Swahili words that correspond to the last three English translations:

1. ninasema        'I speak'
2. wunasema       'you speak'
3. anasema         'he speaks'
4. wanasema       'they speak'
5. ninaona            'I see'
6. niliona              'I saw'
7. ninawaona       'I see them'
8. niliwuona          'I saw you'
9. ananiona          'he sees me'
10. wutakaniona   'you will see me'
11.                        'he saw them'
12.                        'I will see you'
13.                        'He saw me.

by Ronnie Sim and Thomas E. Payne. Copyright © 1998-2007, University of Oregon, Department of Linguistics. Used by permission.

Solutions (invert for publication):
11. aliwaona 12. nitakawuona 13. aliniona