Although "Computational Linguistics" may sound like an esoteric field,
many high-school students believe that it is exciting and fun. The North
American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NACLO) is an annual event for
these students, where they compete for prizes, bragging rights, and the
opportunity to participate in the international contest.

The challenge during this annual competition is to solve linguistics
problems, such as deciphering sentences in an obscure languages, analyzing
foreign grammars and semantics, and identifying computational properties
of the language that would help automate text processing.  The contestants
have three hours to solve a number of tricky problems, and their only
tools are pencils and paper. The problems do not require any specialized
knowledge beyond the standard high-school  program, but they require fast
creative thinking.

The first NACLO took place in 2007 and involved about two hundred
high-school students. Since then, it has grown in popularity; this year it
attracted 1080 students from ninety-six cities across the United States
and Canada, who participated in the first round on February 4. The 135
best students advanced to the second round; the three top performers in
the first round were Tian-Yi Jiang of Durham, NC, Morris Alper of Palo
Alto, CA, and Kyumin Lee of Lexington, MA.  On March 11, the 135 best
students competed in the second round, the results of which will be
availabe in late March. Once the eight winners are determined, they will
form two teams, four students each, and represent the North America in the
International Linguistics Olympiad in Poland on summer of 2009.

The United States is a newcomer to the international competition, but
its teams already showed strong performance during the first two years
of participation. In 2007, the top US team tied for the first/second
place; and one of the US contestants, Adam Hesterberg, took the first
place in the individual competition. In 2008, the top US team again
tied for the first/second place; and the US contestant, Hanzhi Zhu,
took one of the three gold medals among individuals.

While the linguistics competition is fun, it also requires dedication and
hard work by many people, all of whom are volunteers. The organizing
committee is headed by Professor Dragomir Radev (University of Michigan)
and Professor Lori Levin (Carnegie Mellon University), and it also
includes Mary Jo Bensasi, Eugene Fink, Adam Hesterberg, Patrick Littell,
Ida Mayer, James Pustejovsky, and Amy Troyani. The program committee
includes twenty more people, who create new competition problems and judge
the performance of contestants. The other volunteers are high-school
teachers and college students who help to organize and proctor the event.

Dragomir Radev certainly feels that his hard work pays off. "Many of
the participants are extremely bright and have broad interests. In
addition to linguistics, they also excel in physics, mathematics,
computing, and many other subjects. A number of linguistics clubs have
been created at high schools thanks to NACLO. The organizers have been
very pleased to notice a consistent roughly even ratio between male
and female participants."

Lori Levin also believes that it is an important contribution to
education and long-term investment into science. "Computational
linguistics is a rapidly developing field. We all want computers to
speak English and other human languages, instead of requiring us to
learn specialized computer languages. To achieve that goal, we need a
lot of bright researchers working on automation of text and speech
understanding. We hope that competition participants will become these
researchers."  Levin adds, "We also need more multi-lingual people in the US
in business, government, teaching, social services, and humanitarian aid.
We want NACLO to inspire students to enter these exciting language-related
careers.

And, the way Eugene Fink puts it, "most importantly, it is fun for all
participants, both students and organizers."