Competing against over 1,500 students in the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad, Heidi Lei ’20 came in third, placing her into the International Linguistics Olympiad. For the competition, Lei had to solve a variety of linguistic puzzles, through which she learned about the diversity and consistency of languages, as she exercised her logic skills.
For example, for one type of question Lei was given a couple sentences in a very rare language and their English translations. She was asked to translate other phrases from English into the unknown language, and from the unknown language into English. Doing this involved solving the complicated inner workings of an unknown language. In the International Linguistics Olympiad, which will take place this summer, in Dublin, Ireland, Lei will have to compete in an individual round and a team round. The individual round will consist of five questions in which Lei will have six hours to solve. The team round consists of a single question that must be solved in no more than four hours.
Lei, from Beijing, China, said her interest in linguistics “started with the beauty of the Chinese language.” She continued, “After I learned how to speak English, I realized how diverse the components of different languages are. Each language is like a different person with different skill sets and personalities. Although they each have different skills sets and personalities, each person is capable of conveying the same message, just like different languages are able to. I first started with an interest in the different dialects of Chinese and how they are distributed geographically, which is what started the initial formation of my interest in linguistics. There wasn’t a particular moment when I discovered my interest in linguistics. It sort of was always just there.”
Lei’s favorite subset of linguistics is typology. Typology, similar to the classification system of biology, involves a lot of grouping. Typology explains the grouping of words and rules of languages. Lei is also interested in computational linguistics, which includes translators and language processors such as Siri.
In order to be good at linguistics, Lei explained, one does not need to speak multiple different languages. Though Lei could prepare for hours upon hours for a linguistics competition, the practice puzzles could be nothing like the puzzle received in competition. She said, “It’s important to have good logical reasoning skills.” However, Lei does prepare by doing practice problems from previous years, giving her a feel for the actual competition.
To prepare for the team round in the international competition, Lei has been having weekly meeting sessions with her team over the phone and doing team problems with them. Lei is excited for the international tournament this summer and will continue to prepare as much as she can to get as good of a result as she had from the North American tournament.
