Ozclo – Report for elclo

Dominique Estival (8 July 09)

In 2008, we received funding from the Human Communications Science Network (HCSNet) to run the First Australian Computational and Linguistics Olympiad (OzCLO) on the model of NACLO (the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiads). OzCLO 2008 took place over a period of several months, with a training session held on Wednesday 4 June, a State Round on Wednesday 25 June and the final National Round on Wednesday 6 August, all taking place at the Universities of Melbourne and Sydney. Based on the experience of NACLO and our estimate of the Australian audience, we had anticipated a maximum of 10-15 high school students at each location, but our expectations were happily proven wrong. Invitations had been made to 67 high schools in the Melbourne area and 21 high schools in the Sydney area to send teams of three students. The expected numbers came to the training sessions but the bug must have caught because registration then soared within the next 24 hours.

For the State round, twelve Victorian schools sent 18 teams (55 students) and ten NSW schools 23 teams (64 students), ranging from Year 9 to 12. There was strong representation across the school sectors: state, catholic and independent schools. Although these were mostly from the metropolitan areas, we also had one student coming from Ballarat to form a team with another student in Melbourne, as well as 3 teams from Bendigo for Victoria and 3 teams from the larger Sydney area (Camden and Dulwich Hills) in NSW. The three winning teams from the State Round were then invited to compete in the final National Round. The First Prize winner was one of the two teams from University High, Melbourne, VIC. As this winning team was all Year 12 students, we also awarded a Top Junior Team Prize to the best team of Year 9 and 10 students, from James Ruse Agricultural High School, Dulwich Hill, NSW.

In addition to the funding from HCSNet, which allowed us to organise this competition for the first time in Australia, we received generous contributions from a number of organisations: The University of Sydney and The University of Melbourne both waived cost of room hire; Macquarie University agreed to host the web server; CSIRO provided teleconferencing facility. Thanks to the Australian Linguistics Society (ALS), we had food and drinks for the competitors. Thanks to ALS, Appen, the Macquarie Dictionary and Franklin Electronic Publishers, we gave out as prizes books and hand-held electronic Macquarie Schools Dictionaries (which include material from the Macquarie Dictionary of Aboriginal languages).

In terms of the organisation, the OzCLO organising committee involved both linguists and language technology practitioners who helped in various ways: presenting at the training sessions, preparing the problem sets, running the actual sessions, and then marking all the answers. The State Round was marked by each local committee, while the answers to the National Round were distributed among the steering committee members.

Thanks to the Macquarie Dictionary and Franklin Electronic Publishers, each member of the winning team received a copy of the Macquarie Dictionary and a 12-month subscription to the on-line dictionary and each member of the Top Junior Team received an electronic handheld Macquarie Schools Dictionary.

The Australian team who will go to the International Linguistics Olympiad (ILO) in Poland at the end of July is composed of: Ross McGachey (SA), Krysia Choros and Sarah Twomey (QLD). They are funded in part by a grant from the Australian National University, with additional support from the Australian Linguistics Society. HCSNet is funding Dominique Estival to accompany them as their coach. Our other sponsors this year also included the universities, some of which not only waved costs and provided in-kind support, but also generously gave financial support, especially The University of Sydney, Griffith University and the Australian National University. Other in-kind support is provided by CSIRO (teleconferencing facilities) and Macquarie University (website hosting).

Finallly, we were very grateful to NACLO for sharing their problem sets with us, thus making our job in the first year much more manageable: most of the problems in the OzCLO 2008 rounds came from NACLO with only a couple of our own. However in 2009, half of the OzCLO problems were created by OzCLO members and, starting with 2010, we are planning to contribute to the ELCLO problem committee.