Indian National team off to Brazil for International Olympiad of Linguistics

The International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL) challenges participants to analyze the grammar, structure, culture, and history of different languages and to demonstrate their linguistic abilities through puzzles and problem-solving challenges.

While speaking to ANI, Manish Shrivastava, an assistant professor at IIIT Hyderabad (International Institute of Information Technology - Hyderabad) said, "International Linguistic Olympiad is a two-decade-old Olympiad, one of the newer ones, which focuses on puzzles coming out of languages all across the world, and these are based on linguistic phenomena that are required to deeply understand language. This is a school-level event. Participants from all over the world from their school times, come there to participate in teams of four. Most countries send two teams. We are sending two teams of four students each coming from all across India."

Manish Shrivastava works in the language technologies research centre of IIT Hyderabad specifically in the areas of natural language processing and information extraction. Explaining the mode of selection of students, Shrivastava said that these students were chosen from the Indian version of the linguistics Olympiad, the Panini linguistics Olympiad that happens in February, registration opens in December, and students from schools all across India apply for it.

"These national exams happen at various partner institutes, such as triple IIIT Delhi, IIT Madras, IIT Bombay, and many other centres across the country and use their performance as a measure for their capability. A team of 40 is chosen to go for the Asia Pacific linguistics Olympiad and the top performers in that exam are chosen to represent India in the International Olympiad of Linguistics," Shrivastava said.

"India is a linguistically very diverse country. We have a lot of languages. So, even for more harmony within the country, exposure to multiple languages is important, and more than that, if we want to drop this language barrier, language AI becomes important and language AI depends on linguistics. Current language AI models are largely neural models, which are learning the meaning of words by looking at the context. That is the most basic implementation or most basic usage, of linguistic theory in AI. Similarly, a deeper understanding of linguistic principles will allow us to build better, more capable AI systems," the professor added.

"When it comes to the Indian context, we want our young student population to be more aware of this linguistic diversity and the need to understand this linguistic diversity and become capable language researchers to contribute in the language research which would aid the development of the country itself," Shrivastava added.

"If I bring it to the Indian context, very often for many languages, that much digital content is not available. If we want to create capable AI systems like large language models, we have to link language studies, linguistics and AI together so that the model can learn faster without needing all of that large volume of data," he further said.

Anshul Krishnadas Bhagwat, enrolled in the CLD programming at IIIT Hyderabad who will be accompanying the Indian national team to the International Linguistics Olympiad this year said, "I had gone last year as a student in my 12th grade. I received an honourable mention there in Bulgaria. IIIT has a CLD program, which is a Dual Degree program in Computational Linguistics with Computer Science, Bachelor of Technology, and Competition Linguistics Master of Science through research. So in IIIT, we have one of the best MT-NLP (Machine Translation and Natural Language Processing) labs which is machine translation and natural language processing and Artificial Intelligence and generative intelligence."

"So when it comes to language, human language and computer language are very different. Any tool that has to be used by people has to incorporate linguistics because the common person cannot code or cannot use binary language to communicate with a computer. Whenever it comes to Artificial Intelligence, linguistics is at the forefront of it. At the actual helm of interaction between the user and the product is linguistics. So natural language processing is an up and coming field right now and it's booming," Bhagwat added.

He further said that the prospects with respect to generative models like ChatGPT in India will be in the field of Computer Science that will include natural language processing and machine translation-related tasks.

An 18-year-old graduate participant from Mumbai, Faraz Ahmed Siddiqui said, "So, firstly, it acts as a sort of an event, you know, to, like a get together for a young budding linguist of the world and in the like, general overall sense and like if you look at the prospects of the events overall, linguistics, as a field is very important especially in the current age if you look at say people developing language models all although that that is a part of computer science, linguistics is definitely a great part of it."

Siddiqui is a freshman at IIT Kanpur studying physics and has represented India at the International Olympiad of Linguistics on the past two occasions, where he won the silver medal.

"People that have participated in the event in the past and are now working at the edge of, you know, developing superior language models. So it is important in that sense. And in like, the overall development of us, just getting people from other nations to interact with them, because we share common interests and because simply linguistics is interesting. It is interesting to understand Human Sciences, its interesting to understand how human languages form, how they evolve, etc," Siddiqui added.

Shri Laxmi, who is 14 years old and a first-time participant said, "When I found out about this, the first thing I found was that this Olympiad is not like a conventional multiple-choice Olympiad where you can just write it on an OMR sheet because this kind of offers you a new perspective on you know, human thinking, language and logic, and it gives you a fresh perspective of how to view the world in general. So I find that very interesting."

"Language is an integral part of human society in general. So obviously, linguistics plays a very important role, and when I was at IIIT Hyderabad as part of this, I was introduced to computational linguistics. I didn't know about it before, but it's about AI and linguistics and tying up everything together. And that can help a lot in education itself nowadays, and it can help you connect with more people around the world, and know about new cultures. So I think that's good," Laxmi added.

18-years-old participant Dia from Bangalore, who will be at MIT this year and is a second-time participant said, "So at first it was a very new experience for me. It was my first time in a long time going abroad, meeting people, performing at such a big level of competition, you know, meeting people who are so good at what they do. So I feel like I have certainly improved this year and I hope to do much better this year than I did last year.

"It is a very good opportunity to build linguistic strengths, logical thinking and problem-solving skills.It exposed me to the world at large, meet people who are also doing linguistics, but at the same time doing other things as well. And I feel like that opened a lot of doors in the sense that I was able to find more opportunities for myself, in what I like to do, especially in logical thinking, problem solving and things like that. So I would say linguistics is a very nice starting point to discover more about yourself and what you like," Dia said.

Raghava, associate professor at the CSE department, IIIT Delhi said, "Before the students fly out to the event, they have a workshop here and we are providing accommodation and classroom for them to get involved in the workshop and have some sort of training. This also acts as team event. So they are from different schools, different part of India."

"I feel since India is represented at a global event, everyone should come together and help in whatever way they can. So, it helps the nation and the students to know the linguistic part of it and represent India at the global level. IIIT Delhi is happy to help," Raghava added. (ANI)