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Recreational Linguistics. Puzzles in Logic, Languages and Computation
This book brings together, for the first time in one collection, the best English-language problems created for students competing in the Computational Linguistics Olympiad. The Linguistics Olympiad is designed to develop metalinguistic reasoning that is useful for any career involving human language and also to foster analytical problem-solving skills that are relevant for many technical and non-technical careers. The problems represented in this volume also emphasize an aptitude for computational thinking more than linguistics Olympiads in other countries. In addition to using logical and analytical skills, they explicitly focus on concepts and tools from computer science, such as finite state machines and graph search, while also introducing applications of computational linguistics, such as machine translation, information extraction, and automatic summarization. This collection of problems for the linguistics Olympiad is not only a valuable resource for high school students wishing to prepare themselves for the competition, but is a wonderful general introduction to the field of linguistics through the analytic problem solving technique.