Imagine Magazine - Johns Hopkins - Demo - (Page 29)

uistics Computational Linguistics Olympiad came out. I had tied for fifth place with a friend from HCSSiM. This meant that both of us could be alternates, but I was not satisfied. I asked the coach, Dr. Radev, if I could compete as an individual, or if another team could be sent. He decided to send two teams, although the NACLO sponsors would fund only one (the second team had to pay most of their own expenses). Dr. Radev began to send us practice problems from old ILOs and set up a few Internet chat sessions for us to practice group problem solving. Meanwhile, the LSA summer institute was rapidly approaching. From LSA to ILO When my parents and I arrived at Stanford, a student greeted us and helped us find the registration area, and she and I talked about what classes we were taking. I soon met syntacticians, sociolinguists, computational linguists, and specialists in many other areas of linguistics, and each had interesting research to tell me about. Each course met twice a week. Phonology covered theories underlying sound patterns in languages. In the morphology class, we studied the ways parts of words combine in various languages, such as Yup’ik (spoken in Alaska). Semantics centered on predicate logic and lambda calculus—two methods to represent the meaning of sentences in an abstract way. Computational Linguistics, my favorite class, taught us how to implement computational tasks, such as tagging words in a sentence with their parts of speech, or automatically diagramming sentences given a set of rules. I also attended a variety of lectures and workshops. One of these discussed careers for linguists in industry. I learned that linguists are often employed by companies such as Google that develop search engines, machine translation, and speech recognition software. Before I discovered linguistics, I had assumed that I would get a degree in mathematics and use it for industry applications. I was glad to know that the same was possible with a linguistics degree. When I left for Russia, a few days before the institute ended, I felt ready to continue my summer immersion in linguistics. March/April 2008 To Russia and Beyond My parents and I arrived at the hotel in Zelenogorsk, near St. Petersburg, on the Monday night before the ILO. For most of us, this was the first time we had seen our teammates in person. We spent most of Tuesday doing practice problems for the competition under the direction of our coaches, Dr. Radev and Dr. Levin. The individual round of the competition lasted six hours. The first problem asked us to write an English sentence in Braille given a few example sentences. I finished it quickly, and moved on to the next problem, which focused on how to negate words in Movima (a language spoken in Bolivia and unrelated to any other known languages). After this came the two hardest problems: one where we had to match conjugated Georgian verbs with their English translations, and another that gave the Ndom phrases for the first 10 positive perfect squares and asked for their translations and the translations of other numbers and equations. The last problem required finding rules predicting word correspondences between the closely related languages Turkish and Tatar. We spent the next day touring St. Petersburg, playing card games, and preparing for the three-hour team competition. This exam had only one problem: we were given an empty geneaological chart (showing only parent-child relations) and a list of (unnamed) people on that chart with familial relations to (named) others on that chart. All relations were given in Hawaiian. Ours was one of only four teams to reach the correct answer (or any answer), and we shared the first place prize with the Moscow team. The ILO organizers were pleased but surprised that we did so well, given that it was our first time competing. Since the ILO, I have continued to study linguistics independently. I hope to attend the 2009 LSA institute and possibly get an internship in computational linguistics and artificial intelligence. I have started touring colleges and evaluating their linguistics departments. I’ll probably double-major in math and linguistics, the intellectual passion first ignited by The Language Instinct and that now illuminates my future. i Rebecca Jacobs is a junior at HarvardWestlake School in California, where she is president of the school’s math club and a member of the robotics team, the Science Bowl team, and the girls’ choir. Dragomir Radev The U.S. team of Josh Falk, Rebecca Jacobs, Anna Tchetchetkine, and Michael Gottlieb won first place in the 2007 ILO team competition. imagine 29

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Imagine Magazine - Johns Hopkins - Demo

Imagine Magazine - March/April 2008 Contents Letters Big Problems Big Picture In My Own Words Putting E-Waste in Its Place Big Juice Making Waves What Does "Green" Mean? Into the Woods Swimming with Whale Sharks Crash Course in Costa Rica Selected Opportunities & Resources Hooked on Logistics Off the Shelf Word Wise Middle Ground One Step Ahead Exploring Career Options Planning Ahead for College Students Review Creative Minds Imagine Sudoku Knossos Games

Imagine Magazine - Johns Hopkins - Demo

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