BYU North American Computational Linguistics Open Competition 2023

The overall organization

NACLO is an abbreviation for the North American Computational Linguistics Open Competition. It is a fun and educational contest for high school (and younger) students that has them solve linguistics problems drawn from a variety of languages (natural and artificial). Though no prior knowledge of particular languages or of linguistics is required, a good knowledge of logic, reasoning, and problem solving skills is helpful.

The first round of NACLO competition is held locally at various locations in the U.S. and Canada. Students who score well on the test advance to a second invitational round of competition.

The Computational Linguistics Open Competition is a worldwide movement which began in Moscow in the 1960's. The U.S. first entered the competition in 1998. Teams from many other places of the world, including a team of top-scoring students from the U.S. NACLO, compete in the worldwide championship.

Last year

In 2022 over 1,100 high school students from across the USA and Canada competed in the annual North American Computational Linguistics Open Competition. The 2022 competions featured problems about the Avoiuli Bislama, Turkish, Iñupiaq, Icétôd, Tseltal, Cornish, and Ende languages as well as computational topics, such as text summarization and bagged/Wickel grapheme parsing. The top 10% students advanced to the invitational round, a more difficult four-hour test. The top eight NACLO winners from the U.S. advanced to the International Olympiad of Linguistics, held in Castletown, Isle of Man. Further details are available in this press release.

Participate this year!

After a Covid pause since 2020, BYU will resume hosting a local session of the NACLO competition in 2023. If you're a high school student (or even a middle school student) you can participate in the competition here at BYU. To find out more, consult the "Local information" menu above. When you're ready to register, click on the button below.