Owls Advance in Computational Linguistics

Thirteen Owls competed in the North American Computational Linguistics Open Competition January 25, and seniors Varun Krishnamurthi and Ismael Qureshi and junior Gabe Chen have qualified for the invitational round March 16. In Tennessee only six students advanced, and three are Owls.
Also competing in the four-hour exam were senior Jeffrey Liu; juniors Bryan Ding, Will Gramm, Eshaan Patnaik, Alan Zhou; sophomore Amrik Chakravarty; freshmen Albert Ding, Joshua Gramm, Ari Thiyagarajaa, and Ethan Zhao. Mathematics Instructor Steve Gadbois served as coordinator and proctor for the group.
 
NACLO is a contest in which high school students solve linguistic problems in a variety of languages as they learn about the diversity and consistency of language while exercising logic skills. The 2022 contest featured Avoiuli, Bislama, Turkish, Kaktovik Iñupiaq, Ik, Ende, Tseltal, and Cornish.
 
Chen has spearheaded the competition, which has grown from three participants in 2022 to 13 this year. He and Krishnamurthi qualified for the invitational round last year.
 
“What really attracted us to this competition was how the problems were approachable yet challenging,” Chen said, “and the variety of different languages also made it fun.”
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