The USM Linguistics Department will be a host site for NACLO (North American Computational Linguistics Open competition). NACLO is a fun (and educational!) contest for U.S. and Canadian high school students in which contestants compete by solving compelling and creative puzzles in linguistics and computational linguistics. Requiring no previous knowledge of linguistics, languages, or computing, these puzzles can be solved by analytic reasoning alone, and serve as a fun introduction to a field to which many high school students have never been introduced. Professionals in linguistics, computational linguistics and language technologies use dozens of languages to create engaging problems that represent cutting edge issues in their fields. Winners of NACLO are eligible to compete in the International Linguistics Open competition, one of twelve international high school science Open competitions. It is truly an opportunity for young people to experience a taste of natural-language processing in the 21st century.
Please email Jeanne Heil if you have any questions: jeanne.heil@maine.edu.
The Open Round of the competition will be held on January 23rd, 2025! Register now to reserve your spot!