Young Alum Wins Gold in a Different Olympic Settin

Jae-Kyu Lee '08 wins big in International Linguistics Olympiad

October 06, 2008 — It turns out that Caroline Lind ’02 isn’t the only Phillips Academy alum sporting Olympian gold from this summer’s games. Far from Beijing—as the highly publicized athletic contests were underway—teams at the International Linguistics Olympiad were quietly maximizing their mental capabilities in Bulgaria, on the shores of the Black Sea. One of the two U.S. teams, which included Jae-Kyu Lee ’08 of Korea, won the golden cup in a tie with the East Bulgarian team. The games are a spin-off of the original Linguistics Olympiad, founded in the former Soviet Union more than 40 years ago. This was only the second year the United States teams had participated.

Lee was a standout in math and computer science instructor Maria Litvin’s computational linguistics club, which she started on campus just last year. According to Litvin, Lee qualified for the U.S. International  Olympiad Team on the basis of his successful competitions during his senior year at Andover. In addition to the U.S. team’s win, Lee also won a special award for the best solution to one of the five problems, which involved something called Copainalá Zoque.  Anyone with access to Google knows that Copainalá Zoque is a Native American dialect spoken by roughly 10,000 folks in the state of Chiapas, Mexico.

In an e-mail to his Andover teacher (who is teaching in Italy this year with the School Year Abroad program), Lee expressed his excitement in traveling to Bulgaria for the competition. He said he was “stunned by the great historical significance” of the cities Sofia and Plovdiv, which he described as “arguably as rich as that of Rome.” He also was struck by the close proximity of a mosque, a synagogue, a Catholic cathedral and an orthodox church clustered around a statue of St. Sofia, as well as the mix of nationalities—Poles, Russians, Germans, Americans among them—that he encountered during his eight days in Bulgaria. Lee’s visit was greatly enhanced by the fact that he learned to speak Russian during his studies at Andover.

But most of all, Lee wrote, he was impressed that “99 percent of the conversation was about linguistics…We would have a 30-minute conversation on whether only one language has a pharyngealized voiced alveolar fricative—or whether a relative particle has the tendency to come in the beginning or end of a modifier in a language that tends to have attributive adjectives after the noun, but which have modifying phrases before the noun, which is rare. Now I’m realizing I can’t talk to anyone after sharing so many inside jokes on linguistics in Bulgaria!”

He went on to thank Litvin for helping him “to have such a great experience at Andover” and expressed his hope that the computational linguistics opportunity continues to grow at PA. Litvin said she was thrilled, but not surprised, that Lee had had such an outstanding experience. Lee is currently a freshman at Princeton, and is already involved with their linguistics team.

Computational linguistics is an obscure subject rarely encountered even by college students.  It is defined by Wikipedia as “an interdisciplinary field dealing with the statistical and/or rule-based modeling of natural language from a computational perspective.” It grew out of efforts to devise computer language translation capability by developing algorithms and software for intelligently processing language data. With the advent of artificial intelligence research, computational linguistics has become that subfield dealing with human-level comprehension and production of natural language. Although not widely known to the general public, computational linguistics is a rapidly emerging field with applications in such areas as search engine technologies and machine translation, as well as artificial intelligence.

 In the International Linguistics Olympiad, students competed by solving challenging problems using data from a variety of languages and formal systems. They encountered a wide range of challenges, from the phonetic level of organization of languages, through historical linguistics to syntax and even artificial languages. In general, the goal of linguistics is to uncover and formulate the hidden underlying rules and laws that govern language and it use in the life of humans