ONLY FOUR STUDENTS from Illinois will be competing in the final round of the 2008 North American Computational Linguistics Oympiad next week — and three of them are from Uni High.

Sophomore Diana Liu, senior Ethan Berl, and sophomore Daniel Wilson each finished with a score above the U.S. cutoff mark of 58 percent in the competition's first round, which took place on Feb. 5.

Their scores earned them spots in the NACLO invitational round, to be held March 11 online and at various sites, including the University of Illinois.

Richard Sproat, a Uni parent who is a professor in the departments of linguistics and electrical engineering, is the site coordinator for the U of I.

So what exactly is the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad? NACLO is a competition designed to introduce high school and middle school students to linguistics, the science of language.

Students solve analytical problems drawn from real languages and formal symbolic systems. Solving the problems requires the ability to deduce logical patterns; it does not require special knowledge of linguistics or languages. (For sample problems, click here and here.)

A total of 763 students from the U.S. and Canada competed in the first round, but only 117 Americans and 10 Canadians advanced. (The Canadian students qualified under independent criteria.)

Among both Americans and Canadians, Liu ranked 45th, Berl 75th, and Wilson 120th.

The average score on the three-hour, five-problem exam was 39.2 percent. Only three students (two from California and one from Ontario) scored 90 percent or higher. Participants received their results last week.

The purpose of the next round is to select students who will be invited to represent the United States (and perhaps Canada) in the 2008 International Linguistics Olympiad in Bulgaria.

Last year two U.S. teams of four students each competed in the ILO, and the top American team tied with a Russian team for first place. It was the first year the U.S. participated in the contest.

This year, between four and eight U.S. students will be selected for the ILO based on the seven-problem, five-hour invitational exam; the final number will depend on funding. The extent to which Canada is represented will also depend on funding.

This is only the second year that the North American competition has existed. In 2007 it was called NAMCLO, and 195 students took part. Two Uni students finished in the top 50: Wilson, then a freshman, tied for 17th place, and Karen Woodley, then a junior, received honorable mention, meaning she finished between 21st and 50th place. The single-round competition consisted of a nine-hour, nine-problem test.

NACLO is co-sponsored by, among other organizations, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, and Cambridge University Press.