NACLO

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The North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NACLO) is an annual competition in which high school students solve linguistics problems drawn from a variety of languages. Only logic and reasoning skills are necessary; no prior knowledge of particular languages or of linguistics is required. You can see examples of the sort of problems involved here.

There is an Open Round in which anyone can participate. Those who do well in the open round are invited to participate in a second, Invitational Round, and the top scoring students in the invitational round are considered for spots on the US team that competes at the International Linguistics Olympiad.

The home page for NACLO is

http://www.naclo.cs.cmu.edu

NACLO is run by faculty members at the University of Michigan and Carnegie-Mellon University.

Participating locally

The Open Round competition takes place at contest sites across the country. The University of Michigan Linguistics department is one of the contest sites. This year, the Open Round takes place:

  • Wednesday, Feb 2, 2011    Wednesday, Feb 9, 2011
  • 10:00 am - 1:00 pm. Participants should arrive by 9:45 - the competition starts promptly at 10:00, and we will go over rules and any questions beforehand.
  • Lorch Hall, Room 471 - 611 Tappan St. - map

To participate, you just need to register at the NACLO web site.

The contest at the U of M site is rescheduled for next Wednesday, Feb 9. The time and place stay the same as before: 10:00 - 1:00, Lorch Hall room 471.

The contest rules are the same as before - including, in particular, not talking about the problems with anyone who has already participated - with the exception of two changes. First, the jury will not be available, so it will not be possible to ask the jury for clarifications if any questions arise. Second, the usual rule that the top 100 best-scoring students go on to the second round will apply only to students who were able to participate yesterday. The best-scoring students from make-up sessions will also go on to the second round, but the point cutoff for them to qualify will not be determined until the grading is completed.

If you have questions about the local contest site, you can send email to naclo-info@umich.edu.

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