On January 25, 2018, Montclair State University will be hosting a local Open Round competition of the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NACLO).
This event is meant to expose high-school students to linguistics, and to increase general awareness of linguistics as an academic discipline.
In the competition, students solve analytical problems drawn widely from the world's languages.
The problems require only general
reasoning skills. No special knowledge of linguistics or languages is
expected.
The
competition will be held on
January 25, 2018, at 10:00AM-1:00PM
Feleciano School of Business
1st floor, Room 140
Montclair State University
Montclair, NJ 07043
(Please, arrive at least 30 minutes before
the start time!)
RED
HAWK DECK GUEST PARKING:
1)
From Normal Avenue -- take the
College Avenue Entrance
2)
Turn onto College Avenue (Main
Campus Entrance directly across from 30 East Normal Avenue)
3)
Continue on College Avenue as it
bends to the left.
4)
The Red Hawk Deck Parking Garage
will be on your right, adjacent to the Alexander Kasser
Theater.
5)
Park in the garage and exit the garage
from the Fifth Floor.
6)
Follow the path straight ahead
(soccer field on your left) to the Feliciano School of Business building. Once inside,
signs will direct you to Room 140.
NOTE: when using GPS, use 30 East Normal
Avenue, Montclair 07043 | Handicap parking is available in the Red Hawk Deck
NACLO is
held in the USA and in Canada. High school students in New Jersey can
participate at the local competition site at Montclair State University.
Students can
register for the contest online with the central North American organization: http://www.nacloweb.org/register_student.php
The
principle NACLO site (http://nacloweb.org/) has rules
and practice problems for students to review, and all the details about the
event.
See
practice problems at http://www.nacloweb.org/practice.php.
Linguistics is not usually introduced at the high-school level, so students who enter college are often unaware of it as a choice.
Linguistics is the general study of language. It addresses such questions as properties that languages have in common; how language is learned, produced, and understood;
how languages change
through time and vary across geographic regions or social strata; and the
design of language technologies such as speech recognition, machine translation
and information retrieval.
NACLO is
currently sponsored by the US National Science Foundation, Google, the North
American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL), and
Cambridge University Press.
Top scorers in the Open Round in January will be eligible to compete in an Invitational Round on March 8, 2018.
Winners of that competition will be eligible to participate in the International Linguistics Olympiad (ILO). This year it will take place in Prague, Czech Republic http://www.ioling.org/
Last year the competition took place in Ireland: (http://www.iol2017.ie/)
If you have
any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us at
Anna
Feldman, Ph.D.
Professor
Computer
Science & Linguistics