Omputationalcay Inguisticslay (Computational Linguistics)

Omputationalcay Inguisticslay (Computational Linguistics)

Monday, January 14, 2008

By Molly Brean, Allderdice High School (City of Pittsburgh Schools)

As of late, many students have seen their peers hunched over golden yellow sheets of paper, apparently trying to do simple math problems in Indonesian. Simple addition in a language from half a world away may not have supplanted Sudoku, but this puzzle was distributed by the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad, a national contest whose top scorers will win an all-expenses-paid trip to Bulgaria next summer.

By definition, linguistics is the scientific study of language. Linguists are concerned with how people learn language, how languages spread and change over time, and how language functions in society. Contrary to popular belief, most linguists are not fluent in a large number of languages—while they may be familiar with quite a few languages, linguists theorize about the origins of human communication rather than drill vocabulary. Computational linguistics is a relatively new field primarily focused on using computers to understand and apply the rules of language to large quantities of data.

In a recent visit to Allderdice, Professor Alex Hauptmann of Carnegie Mellon University’s Department of Computer Science and Professor David Mortensen of the University of Pittsburgh’s Department of Linguistics held a workshop devoted to explaining the foundations, content, and structure of the upcoming competition.

The linguistics contests were originally held in the Soviet Union during the 1960s, and the concept soon became popular all over Europe. It was not until 2007 that the United States held its first Computational Linguistics Olympiad. While the eventual goal of the competition is to be victorious at the International Linguistics Olympiad (held last year in Estonia, this year in Bulgaria), the competition also serves to encourage students to study the growing fields of computer science, linguistics, and computational linguistics. Many educators point out that computer science and linguistics do not seem especially appealing and/or applicable to high school students. These professors are out to show students that linguistics can be interesting ("Linguistics can be the study of pick-up lines," jokes Hauptmann) and that computer science can move beyond programming to logical problem solving.

The competition is basically a test consisting of a series of varied puzzles. While a fair amount of the problem sets involve reasoning with foreign languages (no prior knowledge required), others give students glimpses of contemporary and interesting issues in computer science. In dealing with the latter type of problem, Hauptmann strongly recommends that students "think about efficiency." One such computer science problem asks students to devise the most efficient way of finding names in the phone book which are actual English words. According to Mortensen, the single most important tool in the competition is "your brain."

The North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad begins on February 5, 2008, with a preliminary round held both online and at eleven universities nationwide. After the first tests are graded, students with the highest scores are invited to participate in an invitational second round on March 11. The national team will be selected based on those results, and the team members will travel to Bulgaria in summer 2008 to compete against other countries in the International Linguistics Olympiad.

All interested students should contact Amy Troyani immediately and visit http://www.naclo.cs.cmu.edu/index.php to register and find more information and practice problems.