CarnegieMellon's Lori Levin is a Coach of the US Team

PITTSBURGH—As athletes gatherin London for the Summer Olympic Games, eight U.S. high school students arepreparing for their own, very different competition at the International Linguistics Olympiad (ILO), July 29to Aug. 3 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Working in four-person teams, they willtackle a series of brain-teasing written problems that can be solved byidentifying similarities and patterns across a range of languages.

The U.S. competitors were thetop scorers earlier this year among 1,400 U.S. and Canadian students whoparticipated in the North AmericanComputational Linguistics Olympiad (NACLO), which is supported by CarnegieMellon University, the University of Michigan and the National ScienceFoundation, among other sponsors. Lori Levin, associate research professor inCarnegie Mellon's Language Technologies Institute, is NACLO chair and a coachof the IOL team.

The U.S. contingent includes"Team Red" — Darryl Wu of Bellevue, Wash.; Anderson Wang of Ambler, Pa.; SamuelZbarsky of Rockville, Md.; and Allan Sadun of Austin, Tex. — and "Team Blue" —Alexander Wade of Reno, Nev.; Aaron Klein of Brookline, Mass.; Aidan Kaplan ofMontclair, N.J.; and Erik Andersen of Sunnyvale, Calif. Wade, Klein andAndersen also competed at the 2011 ILO, which was hosted by Carnegie Mellon.

More than 40 teams are expectedto participate in this year's international event, the largest ever. The UnitedStates has competed in the IOL since 2007, with U.S. students winning fourindividual gold medals, 10 silvers and 10 bronzes. In the team challenge, the U.S.team has received gold medals in four of the last five years. It also hasfinished first three times in the alternative team contest in which the pointsof all team members in the individual challenge are combined.

NACLO is intended to increaseinterest in and awareness of the field of computational linguistics. Though notyet widely known to the general public, computational linguistics is a rapidlyemerging field with applications in such areas as search engine technologies,machine translation and artificial intelligence.

Dragomir Radev of theUniversity of Michigan is the program chair of NACLO and head coach of the U.S.team for the IOL. Among his many responsibilities, Radev gathers ideas fromindustry and academic researchers around the world.

In addition to CMU, Michigan and theNSF, NACLO sponsors include the North American Chapter of the Association forComputation Linguistics, the Linguistics Society of America and the ArmyResearch Lab. For more information, visit the NACLO website at www.naclo.cs.cmu.edu/.