OzCLO: The Australian Computational Linguistic Olympiad

Since 2008 when we organised the First Australian Computation and Linguistic Olympiad (OzCLO), this high-school competition has become an annual event, with almost 800 participants across Australia in 2011. For the third time, we sent an Australian team to the International Linguistics Olympiad (ILO) and the team came back with one silver medal. In this talk, I will give an overview of OzCLO, first presenting the background and history of the competition internationally and in Australia, then explaining how it is organised and run in Australia, and finally discussing the impact and importance of reaching out to highschool students in our discipline. Short Biography Dominique Estival received a PhD in Linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1986. Her research experience in Natural Language Processing has been at the frontier between industry and academia, with positions at ISSCO, The University of Melbourne, the Defence Science and Technology Organisation and private language technology companies in the US and Australia. In 2010, she joined the University of Western Sydney to manage AusTalk, the largest Australian audio-visual speech data collection. Her research interests have included the computational modelling of language change, machine translation, grammar formalisms for linguistic engineering, spoken dialogue systems and aviation communication. She co-founded OzCLO in 2008 and has been the main driving force behind it since then. Dominique Estival. 2011. OzCLO: The Australian Computational Linguistic Olympiad. In Proceedings of Australasian Language Technology Association Workshop, page 3