Problems for OzCLO wanted
Diego Molla-Aliod
This is a final call for problems for OzCLO. As you know, OzCLO is an
Australian-based competition where high-school students are asked to
solve problems in linguistics and computation. The OzCLO organisers
are preparing the problems for next year, and so far the problems we
have are on linguistics topics only. We need problems on computational
linguistics!
Last year OzCLO was very successful, it attracted nearly 800
Australian students, and one of the winners managed to get a medal in
the International Linguistics Olympiad at Pittsburgh. We're likely to
get more students this year, given that word of mouth is spreading
among schools and we had some new inquiries.
Back to the problems, next week we are supposed to decide on the
problems. So far there are no computing-related problems. It would be
great if you could agree to write a problem. The problem is to form
part of a pool of problems for ELCLO. This is the group of
English-speaking countries (USA, Canada, UK, Ireland, and Australia)
that participate in the International Linguistics Olympiad. The group
is led by Lori Levin and Dragomir Radev.
There are examples of problems at:
http://www.ozclo.org.au/problem-sets
Some advice on what types of problems we want:
1. The high-school students are extremely enthusiastic and talented.
They will tackle any problem that requires use of deduction.
2. The problem should be solvable without the need of specific
knowledge of linguistics or computing beyond what is reasonable to
expect from a high-school student.
3. The problem should be solvable without the help of computers. This
is a paper-and-pen competition.
4. Well, a correction from 3: this year we will introduce an online
submission system, but the computer is to be used only to submit the
answers. We will try to automatise the marking as much as we can, so
the answers should be easy to mark automatically if possible.
5. The problems should be fun. Students like to learn from the
problems, e.g. they like to learn about new languages and cultures,
and exotic language expressions.
Let me know if you can help ASAP. Even if the problem is in a draft
form we will welcome it, since someone else can give it the final
shape.
Diego
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Dr. Diego MOLLA ALIOD diego.mo...@mq.edu.au
Department of Computing http://web.science.mq.edu.au/~diego
Macquarie University