Even as the celebrations over Team India’s medals haul at the International Linguistics Olympiad 2024 are yet to die down, we take a look at the path to the finale that unfolds for the Indian contingent. 

Competing against 206 participants drawn from 51 teams across 38 countries, the Indian contestants shone at the 21^st International Linguistic Olympiad (IOL) held in Brasília, Brazil, from July 23 to July 31, 2024. The Indian team demonstrated their prowess in the individual categories with Animikha Dutta Dhar bagging a silver medal, Shrilakshmi Venkatraman and Faraz Ahmed Siddiqui winning a bronze medal each and Ananya Agarwal receiving an Honourable Mention.

India has been competing at the IOL since 2009 but it’s start itself was rather unconventional. The prevailing norm for countries’ participation in the contest is based on each country sending 1 or 2 teams whose composition is based on the winners of their national Linguistics Olympiad. But there had never been a national level Linguistics contest held up until then. Hence the selection of the Indian team itself was rather atypical – an ad-hoc group of 3 students with only this in common: an interest and excellence in Linguistics as well as a desire to compete internationally. Despite the apparent lack of experience, Team India’s debut on the world stage saw it bagging not only a Silver medal but also the ‘Best Solution’ award. Since then, India has participated in 15 Olympiads bringing back 31 medals, 1 bronze trophy, 9 best-solution prizes, 16 honourable mentions and has sent 6 repeat medallists to the Hall of Fame.

Modest Beginnings
“The first Indian team had to approach Dr. Avinash Pandey from the Department of Linguistics, University of Bombay to support their endeavour. By 2013, Dr. Monojit Choudhury of Microsoft Research (MSR) joined the efforts too and a 2-part screening process for schoolkids kicked in. Around 25 students from the open round were selected for round 2 and MSR supported the team that went on to represent India in the IOL. From 2014 onwards, the screening process moved from Bombay to Bangalore and many more people began to get involved,” recalls Prof. Dipti Misra, Language Technologies Research Centre, IIITH, who has been involved in the organising of the national-level screening process for years. For a country that was a little late to the game, it is a testimony of the surge in interest and participation that saw India playing host to the IOL in the year 2016 in Mysore. “It was the same year that IIITH hosted round 2 of the national screening for the first time,” states Prof. Dipti.

Role of APLO
“The past few years, during the pandemic, like other countries, we too followed the Asia Pacific Linguistics Olympiad (APLO) as our selection method (to the IOL) for multiple reasons,” explains Prof. Manish Shrivastava, LTRC, who has led Team India to the IOL on multiple occasions. “One, the quality of the competition and the quality of the questions – both are very high. Second, the way it is organised ensures that the diversity and challenge is continuously increasing. More and more countries are joining in, including India, and more experts are joining (from India) too, so the pool of experts and jury is leading up to a very high quality entrance mechanism that allows our students to interact with participating countries. Additionally, we’re also trying to get organisers of APLO to come and coach our students,” he says. Calling the APLO similar to the IOL in spirit and with respect to the nature and style of the problems, Prof. Parameswari however clarifies that unlike the IOL, the APLO is not a contest where students from different countries physically meet in one place to participate. “Instead, all contestants compete in their home country on the same day. This year, it was held in April,” she says. Shortlisted candidates from round 1 appear for APLO. Based on APLO results, students are further screened for the next round which is the Panini Linguistics Olympiad (PLO).

Role of PLO
The national-level screening process and subsequent training of the candidates who represent India at the IOL is referred to as the PLO. It is a collaborative effort of multiple institutes such as the Microsoft Research Labs India, IIITH, JNU Delhi, and the University of Mumbai and is actively supported by regional coordinators across the country including Chennai Mathematical Institute, IIT Guwahati, SNLTR Kolkata and IIT Patna. While the preliminary round is conducted in multiple centres, from the year 2016, IIITH has been hosting Round 2 which is a 7-10 day camp where the selected students are exposed to concepts such as phonology, semantics, historical linguistics, computational linguistics and more by some of the top linguistics from the country and overseas as well. According to him, the camp hosted by IIITH plays several roles. “We want to promote linguistics itself as a field of study. Plus, this is an excellent way of getting the community to know each other. It leads to offline links so that they can stay in touch and come back next year stronger. It has led to amazing outcomes – silver medals, multiple honourable mentions and so on.”

Computational Linguistics Degree
With the largest natural language processing and related research group in the country nestled on the institute’s campus, the Language Technology Research Center (LTRC) has had linguists, computer scientists and language scholars all working together for many years on multiple aspects of languages – understanding, translating, retrieval, manipulation and more. “The Linguistics Olympiad has a very special role to play in IIITH’s academic structure,” remarks Prof. P J Narayanan, Director, IIITH, referring to the Dual Degree program that offers a B.Tech in Computer Science and an MS by Research in Computational Linguistics (CLD). Students who clear Round 1 of the PLO are eligible to directly appear for the interview round of this channel of admission. “For the first 2 years, we selected candidates through JEE but then we started conducting our own exam because we realised we were not looking for regular engineering aspirants; we were looking for people who found language fascinating. So students who cleared the institute exam were invited for an interview and later, students who did well in the Linguistics Olympiad were directly invited for interviews,” recounts Prof. Dipti.

NEP and Olympiads
Prof. Rajakrishnan Rajkumar is IIITH’s newest linguistic evangelist who has been working tirelessly behind the scenes of this year’s PLO. “My own personal excitement behind the PLO camp stems from getting a captive audience of young school students, some of whom go on to join us as CLD students and who might become good researchers. My other interest is also in popularising this within India and especially in the Hindi heartland where I feel there is lot of undiscovered talent,” he declares. The professor further adds that activities such as conducting the Olympiads align with one of the mandates of the National Education Policy 2020 which emphasises participation in Olympiads to identify talent and explore students’ potential. “The aim of NEP 2020 is to refine the Indian education system from its typical emphasis on rote learning and instead move towards the development of critical-thinking and problem solving skills which Olympiads assess,” remarks Prof. Rajkumar. This year’s PLO camp also witnessed active participation of members and experts from the North American Computational Linguistic (NACLO) circuit. “As a PhD student, I was quite involved in the North American edition of this same Olympiad. We used to conduct outreach activities for the high school students in the state of Ohio. Some of the people that I worked with then are faculty members in US universities. Having their presence this time around is a function of the networks and personal connections we have,” he explains.

International Mentors
PLO 2024 saw keynote talks and guest lectures by several experts in the linguistics field that included Prof. KV Subbarao, retired professor from Delhi University, Dr. Micha Elsner, Computational Linguist, Ohio State University (OSU),  Dr. Marten van Schijndel, Computational Linguist at Cornell University, and Prof. Monojit Choudhury, Mohammed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence among others. Dr. Elsner has personally been championing the cause of linguistics among highschool students in North America and is the coordinator of NACLO at OSU along with Prof. Dan Parker. “We get a lot of people who are Interested in science, technology and even languages but they don’t really understand how all the pieces might go together,” he says. Expressing satisfaction at at the concerted efforts made by a linguistically diverse country like India in training participants for the ILO, Dr. Schijndel remarks that it’s important given that algorithms explaining how humans process language were designed with particular English-focused benchmarks.

Parent And StudentSpeak
According to one of the parents who was present at the start as well as end of the camp, the nature of the Linguistics Olympiad exam is beyond par. “There are a lot of intelligently designed puzzles,” he elaborates. “Besides, it’s being positioned in a way that is unique, you get 4 hours – unheard of for a child of this age to be spending so much time without a break – to solve 4 or 5 problems at max. It’s a different style of testing logical reasoning. What I would tell other parents and other children is that it develops a large amount of logical reasoning and critical thinking in a rather unique way which also includes fun.” For one of the young participants, the camp served as an eye-opener with all the exposure to the theory behind what he had considered as only “puzzle-solving”.”We all are proficient in one or more languages and can speak them but we never really think about the scientific aspect of languages, what does it mean to actually ‘know’ a language. We were given a broad overview of the larger field of linguistics and it has definitely ignited my interest,” he quips.

From the PLO camp that was conducted this Summer at IIITH, two teams were selected for the IOL scheduled to be held in Brazil – Team Saffron, led by Prof. Manish Shrivastava and comprising Faraz Ahmed Siddiqui, Aadibhav Prasad, Animikha Dutta Dhar and Pratyush Vempati; Team Green led by Prof. Parameshwari Krishnamurthi and comprising of the following contestants, Ananya Agarwal, Jatin Vikash, Shrilakshmi Venkatraman, and Diya Agarwal. The two teams also had Anshul Krishnadas Bhagwat playing an observer role.

Official Sponsorship
The Indian contingent’s presence at the global level was made possible in no small part due to the generous funding by Athlyte, Inc, a DE USA incorporated sports analytics company (www.athlytesports.com), serving U.S. college and university sports communicators. In an email message, Dr. Kiron Shastry, President and CEO of Athlyte said, “We are very proud to be associated with the Olympiad helping with the growth of these grade school students who will be scientists of the future. Kudos to the IIITH team for the hard work and effort that made this possible.” IIITH and Athlyte, Inc. recently entered into a collaboration to develop advanced algorithms and data models for sports analytics. These models and algorithms will serve to enhance Athlyte’s Next Generation Sports Communicators Technology Platform.

IOL Brazil
In addition to brain-teasing contests, the participants had the opportunity to interact with indigenous people, their language and their culture. They also explored Brazilian nature during a trail up to Itiquira waterfalls. The contestants participated in a Wikipedia Editathon and various other games organised by the IOL.

What stood out for the Indian team was the warm welcome by the Indian Embassy in Brazil, where they had the opportunity to meet with embassy officials. “This interaction highlighted the support and pride of the Indian community for the young scholars representing their country on the global stage,” reports Prof. Parameswari. She adds that the Indian teams’ achievements at the IOL highlight the country’s growing expertise and interest in the field of linguistics, showcasing the hard work and dedication of both the participants and their mentors.

For more information about the PLO, click here.

To learn more about the IOL, click here.