Limerick students reach Linguistics Olympiad national final

STUDENTS from Castletroy College, Coláiste Chiaráin, Croom; Salesian Secondary College and Villiers School all competed at the National Final of the 18th All Ireland Linguistics Olympiad (AILO), hosted by the ADAPT Centre at Dublin City University.

The 100 finalists represented 56 secondary schools from 20 counties across the whole island and are competing for the chance to represent Ireland at the International Linguistics Olympiad in Bucharest, Romania this July. AILO is run by ADAPT, the Research Ireland Centre for AI-driven Digital Content Technology.

The competition challenges students to apply logic and reasoning to decode unfamiliar languages by analysing the language data they are given to work out the ‘rules’ of the new language.

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Director of ADAPT, Professor John Kelleher said: “The skills developed here are directly transferable to the real world and we hope will give them a love of computing and data-driven research.”

The finalists progressed through a preliminary round, involving nearly 1,000 competitors, held in schools earlier this year. The results of the AILO final will be released mid-March.