2010 Training and Competition dates are now available on the Calendar page.

The Australian Computational and Linguistics Olympiad (OzCLO) is a contest for high school students. It challenges them to develop their own strategies for solving problems in fascinating real languages. The program is designed for students up to 12th grade. High school students don't typically know what linguistics and computational linguistics are, so they probably don't know if they are interested in it until they try the problems. However, students who like languages, maths, computers, and natural sciences are most likely to be interested in this competition.

Any secondary school student who enjoys the sample problems on the web site is encouraged to participate.

The first OzCLO was held in 2008 at Melbourne and Sydney. The three winning teams from the First Rounds in both states competed to solve problems in Icelandic agreement, Finite State Automata, Mayan hieroglyphs, Manam Pile directionals, and spectrograms of English in the National Round in August. Competitors ranged from year 9 to year 12, and came from both state and private schools. The competition was a huge success and a lot of fun for all involved.

In 2009, OZCLO was held at Australian National University in Canberra, Griffith University in Queensland, University of South Australia in Adelaide, University of Melbourne in Melbourne, University of Sydney in Sydney, University of Western Australia in Perth. We sent Australian team to the finals of the International Linguistics Olympiads, in Wroclaw, Poland from 26th to 31st July:

Team:

Ross McGachey (Immanuel College, SA)
Krysia Choros (St Peters Lutheran College, QLD)
Sarah Twomey (St Peters Lutheran College, QLD)

Coach:

Dr Dominique Estival (University of Sydney)

Assistant Coach:

Pawel Mazur (Macquarie University)

The 2009 OzCLO Report is available for download.

Dominique Estival was recently interviewed about ILO 2009 on LinguaFranca, an ABC Radio National program. Listen to the interview here.

The Australian team, Ross McGachey (Year 12), Krysia Choros (Year 11) and Sarah
Twomey (Year 9), has just come back from the 7th International Olympiads in
Linguistics, held in Poland.  This year, 23 teams representing 17 countries
participated in the IOL/IOL and, along with Ireland, Great Britain and India, this
was the first time that Australia was represented.  The team did quite well for a
first effort but even more importantly they really enjoyed the competition -- both
individual and team events -- and they had a great time with the students from so
many other countries in the excursions in and around Wroclaw.

See the press release from the IOL/ILO here and a report from two of the Australian representatives, Krysia and Sarah, here.