Introducing Computational Concepts in a Linguistics Olympiad
Patrick Littell, Lori S. Levin, Jason M. Eisner, Dragomir Radev · 2013
Linguistics olympiads, now offered in more than 20 countries, provide secondary-school students a compelling introduction to an unfamiliar field. The North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NACLO) includes computational puzzles in addition to purely linguistic ones. This paper explores the computational subject matter we seek to convey via NACLO, as well as some of the challenges that arise when adapting problems in computational linguistics to an audience that may have no background in computer science, linguistics, or advanced mathematics. We present a small library of reusable design patterns that have proven useful when composing puzzles appropriate for secondary-school students. 1 What is a Linguistics Olympiad? A linguistics olympiad (LO) (Payne and Derzhanski, 2010) is a puzzle contest for secondary-school students in which contestants compete to solve self-contained linguistics problem sets. LOs have their origin in the Moscow Traditional Olympiad in Linguistics, established in 1965, and have since spread around the world; an international contest