Can you solve these language puzzles? Test your skills with these problems from North America's biggest linguistics competition

"Computational linguistics is a two-way street: You're either using a computer to do things with human language or communicate or translate or teach a foreign language, or you're using computational techniques to learn something about human languages. Her work documenting and preserving endangered languages uses a little bit of both."

"These students represent the future of computational linguistics, a field that uses computers and algorithmic methods to detect and understand patterns in language. Interest in the field has skyrocketed as coders have used linguistic principles to build and improve large language models, which power much of today's generative artificial intelligence."

"Tom McCoy, a former NACLO winner who is currently a competition organizer and computational linguistics researcher at Yale University, works to bridge the gap between how language is handled in large language models and how it's described in linguistic theory."

More than 200 host sites across the U.S. and Canada hosted the North American Computational Linguistics Open Competition (NACLO) in January, where students solved linguistic puzzles by identifying and applying language patterns. Over 250 top scorers advanced to an invitational round, with eight to twelve winners earning spots at the 23rd International Linguistics Olympiad in Bucharest, Romania. Computational linguistics, which uses computers and algorithms to detect language patterns, has experienced surging interest due to its role in developing large language models that power generative AI. The field operates bidirectionally: using computers to process human language for communication, translation, and education, or employing computational techniques to understand language structure. Researchers like Lori Levin at Carnegie Mellon University apply these methods to document endangered languages, while others like Tom McCoy at Yale bridge linguistic theory with AI language processing systems.

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