On January 26th, over fifty students from schools all over Connecticut, including several from New Haven Public Schools, visited Yale to compete in the Open Round of the 2017 North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NACLO). Each student took a 3-hour written test consisting of linguistics puzzles such as developing a computational procedure to solve a linguistic task or to decipher writing, numeral, or language kinship systems. The top scorers across North America will advance to NACLO’s Invitational Round; the finalists there form teams that compete in the International Linguistics Olympiad in Ireland.This is the fourth year that the Yale linguistics department has hosted the competition, organized by professor Raffaella Zanuttini and a team of undergraduates including seniors Aidan Kaplan and Tom McCoy, junior Kate Rosenberg, sophomore Jay Pittman, and freshman James Wedgwood. Aidan, Tom, and James all participated in NACLO in high school and advanced to represent North America at the International Linguistics Olympiad in Ireland.
Best of luck to students advancing to the Invitational Round!
For more information check out NACLO@Yale.