4/29/2009
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Local High School Students Placed in Top 10% Nationwide, Compete for Chance to Represent US and Canada
The University of Illinois department of computer science will host the team-qualifying round of the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad at the Thomas M. Siebel Center for Computer Science on Wednesday March 11. This event is the second round of the competition, an international contest in which high-school students solve linguistic puzzles.
During the first round of the competition, also hosted by CS in early February, two contestants advanced to the second, invitational round. University Laboratory High School students Maxim Sigalov and Diana Liu will now compete for a slot on the US national team. Only 135 of the more than 1350 participants nationwide were selected to participate in the second round, placing the 2 central Illinois winners in the top 10% nationwide. Maxim, an 8th grader at the school, placed 13th in the nation during the first round, and 1st nationwide in his age group.
If selected, the students would represent the US and Canada during the International Linguistics Olympiad in Poland in July and compete against teams from across the world.
The North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NACLO 2009) is a competition for middle-school and high-school students, which involves solving problems on linguistics and computational linguistics. Computational linguistics refers to an interdisciplinary field that uses statistical or rule-based modeling of human's natural language from a computational perspective. In solving the problems, students learn about the diversity and consistency of language, while exercising logic skills.
The contest was organized locally by Roxana Girju and Julia Hockenmaier from the University of Illinois.
Professionals in linguistics, computational linguistics and language technologies use dozens of the world's languages to create engaging problems that represent cutting edge issues in their fields. Check out the practice problems: www.naclo.cs.cmu.edu/practice.php.
For more information about this event, visit: nlp.cs.uiuc.edu/NACLO.