Language Puzzles, NACLO, and a Note of Thanks

Scientific American’s piece on the North American Computational Linguistics Open Competition — and a personal thank-you to the people who built the world that drew me into linguistics.

Cover image from the Scientific American article.

This Scientific American article on the North American Computational Linguistics Open Competition (NACLO) highlighted both the people behind it and the impact it has had over the years [1]. Deep appreciation to Lori Levin, Dragomir Radev, Tom Payne, James Pustejovsky, and Tanya Korelsky, whose founding work helped create a competition that has introduced so many students to linguistics, AI, and language preservation through the joy of solving language puzzles. Lori in particular helped guide me into the wonderful world of linguistics back in my grad school days, and her class inspired me to write my first computational linguistics paper [2], motivated by the idea that field linguists should not have to rely on shoeboxes full of note cards and lexical slips to collect and analyze language data!

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References

[1] “Try These Language Puzzles from North America’s Biggest Linguistics Competition.” Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/try-these-language-puzzles-north-americas-biggest-linguistics-competition/

[2] Han, Benjamin. “Building a Bilingual Dictionary with Scarce Resources: A Genetic Algorithm Approach.” Proceedings of the Student Research Workshop, Second Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL 2001). https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~benhdj/Publications/Published/bhan_naccl_2001.pdf

Originally posted on LinkedIn.