I just learned of NACLO, and thought I'd share it with people. This is the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad, and it's a FREE contest that's held in late January next year (2013). This seems like a cool career path (computational linguistics) that students may not have been aware of.
Here's a link to past contests. And there look to be super fun problems.
Some things that Computational Linguists think about and work on:
* speech recognition
* detection of deception
* search engines
* spam detection
* how (and why) do languages change?
* what do human languages have in common?
NACLO is super-cool and there's a lot of overlap between kids who are good at math and kids who do well at NACLO. It's common for one or more MathCampers (Canada/USA MathCamp) to head to the ILO.
ReplyDeleteWe'd never heard of it until my daughter went to MathCamp. She ended up not participating, but has lots of friends who have.
It's a two round contest -- the first round is the January test. Then, there's another round after that that picks the US team for the ILO.
Good to know! I'm having fun just doing the puzzles myself since I heard about it on Wednesday.
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