What is it?

The North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad is a contest exam for High School students, taking place in two rounds. An open round, in January, is open to any interested students. High scorers are called back for an invitational round in March. From here, a national team is assembled for the International Linguistics Olympiad. The Linguistics program at the University of Calgary hosts a testing site for the open round, taking place on campus in the School of Languages, Linguistics, Literatures and Cultures.

The test is a pencil-and-paper exam testing students on logic, pattern recognition, and problem solving using both real and created language data. For a Canadian comparison, this is similar in form and challenge to the CEMC contest exams in Mathematics (Gauss, Euclid, Cayley, etc…) . The test is of interest to students in STEM areas interested in pursuing post-secondary work in Linguistics or Computing Science. Formal linguistics underlies many of the most important career paths in computing, including speech recognition and synthesis, text mining, sentiment analysis, and language generators such as ChatGPT.

The next contest will be January 23, 2025 at 10:00am MST

For more information on NACLO, and to register, visit their official website.

Bootcamps

The Linguistics program is offering, free of charge, bootcamp training for Calgary students interested in taking the NACLO exam. With one or two facilitators, a faculty member or a graduate student, past exam questions will be covered, touching on a range of question-types likely to appear on the exam. Along the way, students will learn basic concepts of Linguistics, which will be beneficial for the exam, as well as in linguistics courses that students might take in post-secondary. Students will be interacting with post-secondary educators able to answer questions about possible academic and industry career paths.

Bootcamps are offered in two formats. Afternoon or evening sessions can be set up at the University of Calgary, accommodating either students working individually, or groups from a single school. Subject to scheduling availability, classroom visits at schools in Calgary can also be arranged. Virtual sessions on zoom may be arranged as an alternative.

For more information, contact naclo.uofc@ucalgary.ca