By Deren Kudeki
Gargoyle staff reporter
Posted Monday, April 23, 2007, The OG, news & student awards

FRESHMAN DANIEL WILSON and junior Karen Woodley have placed in the top 50 of the 2007 North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad out of the 195 students who participated.

Wilson tied for 17th place, while Woodley received honorable mention, meaning that she placed between 21st and 50th place.

NAMCLO is a nine-hour test that consists of nine difficult problems pertaining to language and finding patterns in language.

This is NAMCLO's inaugural year. The test was given in person March 29 at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., and the Royal Sonesta Boston Hotel (organized by Brandeis University) in Cambridge, Mass., and could be taken online for students not in those regions.

The competition was sponsored by Google, the North American chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, and the National Science Foundation.

A team consisting of the four highest-scoring NAMCLO students will represent the United States at the International Linguistics Olympiad in St. Petersburg, Russia, from July 31 to Aug. 4.

The test finds its roots in Russian linguistics and math competitions that started in Moscow in the 1960s. Similar tests started up around the world in the years after that. The University of Oregon hosted the first such competition in the United States in 1998, and the first international competition was held in 2003.

NAMCLO's Web site features practice problems, as well as a PDF of questions from the test.

RELATED

— 2007 NAMCLO: Official site