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ANDOVER — Computational linguistics is an obscure subject even college students don’t usually encounter until they are well along in their undergraduate careers. But Jae-Kyu Lee, a senior at Phillips Academy, has landed himself a spot on the North American team that will travel to Bulgaria in August for the Sixth International Computational Linguistics Olympiad. He competed against an original field of 763 students; the pool was reduced to 115 for the invitational, and final, round. Lee placed fifth among the eight students who won spots on the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NACLO) team. Another Andover senior, Benjamin Niedzielski, made it into the invitational round and placed 12th. Niedzielski is from Methuen, Mass. and Lee from An-Yang City, Korea.
Students compete in the Computational Linguistics Olympiad by solving challenging problems using data from a variety of languages and formal systems the students have never learned. This year students in the qualifying rounds solved a total of 12 problems, including one that asked them to interpret the Babayin writing system, an alphabet used in the Philippines before the arrival of Spanish; they were given only a few Babayin examples with their English translations. Other problems dealt with how computational thinking may be applied to some thorny language processing problems, such as how to correctly determine what language a document is written in or how to accurately read spectrograms—printouts of the frequency spectra of speech, popularly known as “voiceprints.” Others dealt with Japanese compound nouns, the Mayan calendar system, and translations of Irish place names into English.
Maria Litvin, instructor in math and computer science, stirred campus interest in the competition last fall after the United States had participated in the international competition for the first time and tied for first place with the Russian team. She organized practice sessions for interested students and administered the Open Round for 22 PA students in February. In March, five PA students were invited back to the Invitational Round. Litvin said Lee, who is headed to Princeton University in the fall, will travel to Bulgaria for the August Olympiad. Niedzielski is still weighing his college options.
Computational linguistics, though not yet widely known to the general public, is a rapidly emerging field with applications in such areas as search engine technologies, machine translation, and artificial intelligence.
The U.S. program is sponsored by the National Science Foundation, Google, and Cambridge University Press. Similar programs have taken place for more than 40 years in Eastern Europe, and the International Competition is in its sixth year. “NACLO bridges the ‘techie/fuzzy’ divide that characterizes our increasingly specialized academic culture. Students learn not only about computational applications to language processing, but also about the beauty and complexity of the world’s languages,” said Dr. Thomas Payne of the University of Oregon, co-chair of the program. “It is a real cross-cultural experience to try to solve problems in languages which sometimes follow logic that is very different from our own familiar ways of thinking.”
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