North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad 2008

[Thomas E. Payne]

The second annual North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NACLO)
will take place in February and March of 2008. 

Earlier this year, 195 high school students from around the USA participated
in the first NACLO competition. Eight of the top winners went on to compete
at the International Linguistics Olympiad in St. Petersburg, Russia, and
came home with several awards, as well as many fond memories (see
www.namclo.org). In the coming year, NACLO winners will be eligible for the
International Linguistics Olympiad to be held in the Summer of 2008 in
Bulgaria. 

The success of any Linguistics Olympiad program such as NACLO depends on the
collaborative efforts of many in the linguistics and computational
linguistics communities throughout the world. At this point you can
participate by: 

1. Hosting a 'site' for the North American Open competition in February. 
2. Serving on a NACLO committee. 
3. Creating problems, or ideas and data for problems to be used in future
Olympiads. 

Hosting a site involves inviting high school students from your area to your
university on a given day in February (exact date to be determined). Your
students and faculty will then administer the contest for two to four hours,
and then forward the high-school students' solutions to the judges for
scoring. 

Committees in need of members at this point are: 

Program: Creating, evaluating and scoring problems used for publicity,
practice and the actual competition for 2008. 
Publicity: Creating flyers, writing and distributing press releases and
other publicity materials. 
Development: Identifying and approaching potential funding sources. 
Follow up: Obtaining and distributing prizes and certificates, evaluating
the program and organizing mentoring programs, summer schools, and summer
internships. 
ILO team: Making travel arrangements, researching legal issues,
corresponding with competitors and families, conducting coaching sessions,
and traveling with the team to Bulgaria in the Summer of 2008. 

Challenging and engaging linguistics and computational linguistics problems
are the centerpiece of any Linguistic Olympiad program. Guidelines for
problem creation can be found at
http://www.uoregon.edu/~tpayne/ProblemCreation.pdf. 

Thank you very much for your help in raising the profile of our discipline
among secondary school students. Please contact any of the executive team
members below if you have any questions or would like to participate in
2008. 

Local contests or general volunteering: 

Lori Levin (General co-chair 2007-2008) lsl at cs.cmu.edu 
Thomas E. Payne (General co-chair 2007-2008) tpayne at uoregon.edu 

Problem ideas or registration: 

Dragomir Radev (Program chair 2007-2008) radev at umich.edu 

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