A State College Area High School senior is one of just eight students nationwide selected to represent the United States this summer at the 15th International Linguistics Olympiad.
Joey Feffer was named to the U.S. national team by the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NACLO) after his performances on tests in an ‘open round’ and an ‘invitational round.’
In the open round 1,509 students competed at 200 sites to solve ‘linguistic puzzles about Tschiluba, Vietnamese, Turkish, Persian, Tamil, and Central Alaskan Yup’ik. Other subjects included neural networks, regular expressions, and finite-state transducers,’ according to a State College Area School District release.
The invitational round included 160 students who advanced from the opening round. They were challenged to solve problems involving ‘automata rewriting, context-based semantic inference, and recursive grammar, and languages such as Basque, Norwegian, Abkhaz, Maori, Bulgarian, Khakas, and Proto-Algonquian,’ the release said.
Feffer will compete on one of two four-person teams at the International Linguistics Olympiad, July 31 to Aug. 4 in Dublin, Ireland.
NACLO is funded by the National Science Foundation, the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, the Linguistics Society of America and Yahoo! Inc.
