McLing, McLean’s Computational Linguistics Club, hosted an interest meeting for the North American Computational Linguistics Open (NACLO) competition, with representatives from Johns Hopkins University (JHU).
“Our club was formed in honor of [NACLO],” said junior Sarah Li, co-president of McLing. “NACLO entirely adheres to our club goal because we want to promote both computer science and linguistics, [which] completely aligns with the purpose of the competition as well.”
In the competition, NACLO participates in categories that test topics such as language, computer science and identifying patterns within linguistics.
“Some of them are about trying to translate different languages into each other, and some of them are about trying to understand different computer algorithms that can understand human language,” Li said.
The competition requires recognizing patterns in designated problems. Throughout the meeting, the three university representatives. Nate Robinson, Andrew Sun and Guangyao Dou, provided various sample problems similar to prototype questions to prepare and share more about NACLO.
“The representatives [were helpful because they] taught efficient ways to learn new languages and find patterns in the practice problems,” said junior Verity Oh, a member of McLing.
The JHU team’s practice problems covered topics such as decoding the Gilbertese language and Hittite, an extinct language of the Anatolian branch of the Indo-European language family.
“[Practicing these problems helped] me understand the structure of questions from previous tests, which I find helpful to prepare for the competition,” Oh said.
With the competition coming up on Jan. 29 next year, McLing hopes to utilize these resources from the representatives for future club meetings.
“McLing plans to discuss different NACLO questions and go over them together as a club [for future meetings],” Li said. “We also plan to have online meetings, where we discuss different linguistic topics to prepare for the competition.”
Li and co-president Allegra O’Grady hope to continue the level of success they achieved throughout the competition in previous years, including last year’s qualification for the invitational round.
“We don’t have a specific number ranking in mind, but I want to make sure [the team gets enough practice] to do well,” O’Grady said. “Even if we don’t qualify for the invitational round, I want everyone [to feel prepared].”
