More than 100 local students spent hours in McConomy Auditorium poring over linguistics problems during the first North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NACLO) March 29, a low-key beginning to a process that would yield high honors for U.S. students in international competition this summer.

NACLO, which was co-chaired by Lori Levin, associate research professor in the Language Technologies Institute and Tom Payne, research faculty at the University of Oregon, identified eight talented high school students, including Shadyside Academy's Joshua Falk. From Aug. 1-4, those students represented the United States for the first time at the Fifth International Linguistics Olympiad in St. Petersburg, Russia. One of the two US teams tied with one of the Russian teams for first place in the team competition. In the individual contest, one of the US students won the top prize for an individual.

"We knew the other teams had trained more than we did," said Levin, "But we also knew that our kids had trained on the previous four Olympiad tests and on some Russian tests. And we knew our kids were extremely smart." Levin helped train the students, along with team coach Dragomir Radev, associate professor of computer science and linguistics at the University of Michigan, and Amy Troyani, facilitator for gifted education and world language teacher at Taylor Allderdice High School in Pittsburgh.

The International Linguistics Olympiad this year included problems in languages and writing systems that the students didn't know in advance such as Georgian, Turkish, Tatar, Hawaiian, Movima (Bolivia), and Braille. The hardest problem involved figuring out the number system used in Ndom (Papua New Guinea).

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