Local students coming to Yale for NACLO

January 29, 2014

On Thursday, January 30, twenty-six students from local middle schools and high schools will arrive at Yale to compete in the Open Round of the 2014 North American Computational Linguistics Open competition (NACLO). Each student will take a written test consisting of linguistics puzzles. Some of these problems might look familiar from introductory linguistics assignments, while others involve developing a computational procedure to solve a linguistic task, and still others require students to decipher writing, numeral, calendar, or kinship systems. The top achievers across North America will then advance to NACLO’s Invitational Round; the finalists there form teams that compete in the International Linguistics Olympiad. This is the first year that the Yale linguistics department has hosted the competition, organized by professors Raffaella Zanuttini and Bob Frank and two undergraduates, Aidan Kaplan and Tom McCoy, who participated in NACLO in high school and earned gold medals at the International Linguistics Olympiad in 2012 and 2013, respectively.

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