2009Q3 Reports: ELCLO 2009

English Language Computational Linguistics Olympiads Report by Dragomir Radev and Lori Levin

Organizers and Web Pages:

• Australia: Dominique Estival: http://www.ozclo.org.au/
• Canada: Patrick Littell: http://www.naclo.cs.cmu.edu
• Ireland: Harold Somers: http://www.cngl.ie/ailo.html
• United States: Lori Levin and Dragomir Radev: http://www.naclo.cs.cmu.edu

The NACLO initiative (www.naclo.cs.cmu.edu), North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad, has expended in 2009 to include the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, in addition to Australia, which joined in 2008. The main idea is to use a standard pool of problems in all these English-speaking countries. (Note that the French-speaking portion of Canada will start participating in 2010, using problem sets in French).

This is a fun, but serious way to introduce high school students to linguistics, language technologies, and less commonly taught languages through puzzles.

Many other countries hold linguistics Olympiads for high school students in their official languages. Any country may send up to two teams of four high school students to the International Linguistics Olympiad (ILO). The ILO jury will translate the exam in the language of any country and will find jury members to grade them. Countries with experience in linguistics Olympiads are happy to help other countries get started.

NACLO receives funding from NAACL. As far as we know no other linguistics Olympiad receives funding from an ACL-related organization.

In the 2008 ILO, the two US teams won 11 out of 33 prizes. In the US in 2009, over 1000 students from 29 states participated in NACLO. Over 30 universities hosted the contest, and many students participated at their own high schools. More information can be found on the NACLO web site: http://www.naclo.cs.cmu.edu. A report is available here: http://tangra.si.umich.edu/~radev/clo/naclo09/press-release.txt

In 2009, OzCLO 2009 has now grown to be an almost Australia-wide event, with local organising committees in New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, West Australia and the ACT. More than 330 high school students competed in the Sate Round in NSW, VIC, SA, WA, and the ACT held at the University of Sydney, the University of Melbourne, the University of Western Australia and the Australian National University on 4 March. More information on OzCLO 2008 and 2009 can be found at: http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~lsl/acl/OzCLO_Report-for-ELCLO-1.doc.

The AILO report is here: http://tangra.si.umich.edu/~radev/reports09/AILO%20report.doc

The US, Ireland, and Australia will compete in the International Linguistics Olympiad in Wroclaw, Poland July 26-30, 2009 along with several other European and Asian countries. URL: http://www.math.uni.wroc.pl/~msliw/lingw/iol/index.php