Whatcom County students participating in linguistics event on campus today

High school students from Whatcom County will be participating in the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad today on campus, which is being proctored by Western's Department of Linguistics.

Students compete in the Linguistics Olympiad by solving challenging problems using data from a variety of languages and formal systems. In the course of solving the puzzles, students discover facts about languages and formal systems. The competition is an excellent way of helping high school students discover their talents and interests in the areas of language, linguistics, and natural language processing, and there is no prerequisite knowledge required.

Thousands of students from the United States and Canada participate at the same time (from 9 a.m. to noon) in this annual Olympiad, which has been going on since 2006. Western has hosted the annual competition since 2013. 

The top scorers of the competition are eligible to represent their countries at the International Olympiad in Linguistics (IOL). This year’s IOL will be held in Bansko, Bulgaria.