Tom McCoy quoted in Scientific American article about NACLO

On March 19, 2026, Scientific American published an article about the North American Computational Linguistics Open competition (NACLO), a contest that introduces high school students to linguistics and natural language processing. The article is titled “Can you solve these language puzzles? Test your skills with these problems from North America’s biggest linguistics competition.” Faculty member Tom McCoy, who is one of the organizers of the contest, was quoted in the piece, which also includes two problems that he created for past iterations of the contest.

The Yale Linguistics Department has also long served as a host for the contest, welcoming local high school students to campus in order to compete. This year’s Yale volunteers are Raffaella Zanuttini, Jason Shaw, Tom McCoy, Erin McCarthy King, William Palmer, Sida Chen, David Garsten, Juliano Portela, Yuyang Liu, Richard Luo, and Kara Amar. For more about NACLO at Yale, see here: https://ling.yale.edu/events/naclo-at-yale.