2012Q3 Reports: Linguistics Olympiads 2012

In 2011 the International Linguistics Olympiad (http://www.ioling.org) was held in the US at Carnegie Mellon University (local host, Lori Levin).

There were 102 participants from 19 countries. Results can be viewed here: http://www.ioling.org/results/2011/.

The cost of hosting the IOL in 2011 was around $65,000 (USD). The sponsors were the US National Science Foundation (linguistics and CISE), Carnegie Mellon University, Language Technologies Institute, Department of English, and School of Computer Science, the Linguistic Society of America, NAACL (support of US and Canadian teams), the Linguistic Data Consortium, Yahoo (support of US teams), University of Pittsburgh Department of Linguistics and English Language Institute, Franklin Electronic Publishers (prizes), Yandex (prizes), Ohio State University Department of Linguistics, M*Modal, Prithvi, and many individual donors.

Costs are now rising as more countries are participating. There may be 35 countries participating in Slovenia in July, 2012. This is placing a large burden on the host countries, as the host country has traditionally paid for room and board for four students and a chaperone from each country.

It is becoming more important for IOL to have regular sponsors, and the IOL hereby requests sponsorship by the ACL of about $5,000 per year.

(The reason for almost doubling the number of participating countries in 2012 is that many countries could not afford travel to the US in 2011 and decided to wait until the contest was held in Europe.)