Conference: Training the US Computational Linguistics Team

Linguistics is the science of language. The breadth of the field’s applications makes it vital to technological and medical advancements and economic competitiveness in a global economy, as well as U.S. national security. In addition, recent advances in Artifical Intelligence pertain to the robust use of human language by computers, potentially impacting many aspects of daily life. Given the multi-faceted importance of human language for the country, it is crucial to devote resources to the introduction of this field to high school students and to recruit the brightest minds in the country to pursue careers in linguistics and language technologies. Currently, worldwide, linguistics and language technologies are taught primarily in post-secondary education. This project raises awareness of the value and significance of linguistics and language technologies among young people under the age of twenty from diverse demographic backgrounds. This project consists of two events. The first is a training workshop for US high school students who are competing in the International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL). The training involves honing problem-solving skills on logical puzzles that exercise pattern recognition and analytical reasoning and take hours to solve. It also includes the building blocks of linguistics: phonetics, phonology, morphology, and morphosyntax, as well as special topics such as kinship systems, number systems, and systems of poetic meter and rhyme. The second event is a planning workshop for the United States' annual high school competition in linguistics and computational linguistics (NACLO, North American Computational Linguistics Open competition). It focuses on how to meet the needs of diverse high school students throughout the US. The target of the workshop is metrics of diversity, plans for outreach, and plans for the future of NACLO taking diversity into account. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.