Kansas State University

Math department offers national competition in computational linguistics for high school students

Submitted by Natasha Rozhkovskaya

For the second time, the math department will host the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad, or NACLO, on Jan. 23, 2020. Seven high school students from Kansas participated in the open round of this national event last year with one winner who qualified for the invitational round. Participation in the competition is free.

The Olympiad is a national contest for U.S. and Canadian high school students. 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 new field of linguistics, cryptography and mathematics.

Winners of the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad are eligible to compete in the International Linguistics Olympiad — one of 12 international high school science olympiads.

Other competitions organized by mathematics department include American Math Competition — AMC 8 and AMC 10/12 — Manhattan Mathematical Olympiad and USA Math Kangaroo Competition.