Skip to content

publications

Publications about the Linguistics Olympiad

The list below takes you to publications which discuss either the general idea of olympiads in linguistics, or national olympiads such as UKLO. The list is organised chronologically, with the most recent works at the top.

  • Houldridge, Lauren. 2026. Focus on… Coming Out of the Linguistic Shell. Languages Today 53. 10.
  • Hasson, Emily. 2026. Can you solve these language puzzles? Test your skills with these problems from North America’s biggest linguistics competition. Scientific American.
  • Khouja, Jude, Karolina Korgul, Simi Hellsten, Lingyi Yang, Vlad Neacșu, Harry Mayne, Ryan Kearns, Andrew Bean & Adam Mahdi. 2025. LINGOLY-TOO: disentangling reasoning from knowledge with templatised orthographic obfuscation.
  • Neacșu, Vlad. 2024. Linguistics Olympiad: Training guide. Berlin: Language Science Press.
  • Bean, Andrew, Simi Hellsten, Harry Mayne, Jabez Magomere, Ethan Chi, Ryan Chi, Scott Hale & Hannah Rose Kirk. 2024. LINGOLY: A Benchmark of Olympiad-Level Linguistic Reasoning Puzzles in Low-Resource and Extinct Languages.
  • Lin, Zheng-Lin, Chiao-Han Yen, Cheng Xu, Deborah Watty & Shu-Kai Hsieh. 2023. Solving Linguistic Olympiad Problems with Tree-of-Thought Prompting. In The 35th Conference on Computational Linguistics and Speech Processing (ROCLING 2023). Taipei City, Taiwan.
  • Bellos, Alex. 2020. The Language-Lover’s Puzzle Book. Lexical perplexities and cracking conundrums from across the globe. Guardian Faber.
  • Şahiny, Gözde Gül, Yova Kementchedjhieva, Phillip Rust & Iryna Gurevychy. 2020. PuzzLing Machines: A Challenge on Learning From Small Data. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 1241–1254. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.115.
  • Derzhanski, Ivan & Milena Veneva. 2018. Linguistic Problems on Number Names. In Computational Linguistics in Bulgaria 2018. Bulgaria. https://aclanthology.org/2018.clib-1.21.pdf.
  • Verhoeven, Babette. 2016. The pleasures of a good problem: writing puzzles for the Linguistics Olympiads. https://doi.org/10.13140/RG.2.2.16297.85602.
  • Estival, Dominique, Cathy Bow, John Henderson, Barbara Kelly, Mary Laughren, Elisabeth Mayer, Diego Moll+í, et al. 2014. Australia Loves Language Puzzles: The Australian Computational and Linguistics Olympiad (OzCLO). Language and Linguistics Compass 8(12). 659–670.
  • Roos, Patrick & Hedvig Skirgård. 2013. The Swedish Model of Public Outreach of Linguistics to secondary school Students through Olympiads. Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Teaching Natural Language Processing , pages 42–45,Sofia, Bulgaria, August 4-9 2013.
  • Littell, Patrick, Lori Levin, Jason Eisner & Dragomir Radev. 2013. Introducing Computational Concepts in a Linguistics Olympiad. In Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Teaching Natural Language Processing, 18–26. Association for Computational Linguistics.
  • Hudson, Richard & Louis Blois. 2013. Language as headache: puzzles, problems and the Linguistics Olympiad. Babel 2. 39–43.
  • Hudson, Richard & Neil Sheldon. 2013. Linguistics at School: The UK Linguistics Olympiad. Language and Linguistics Compass 7(2). 91–103.
  • Hudson, Richard. 2012. Language as head-ache: the UK Linguistics Olympiad. ISMLA Newsletter Summer 2012. 38–40.
  • Derzhanski, Ivan & Thomas Payne. 2010. The Linguistic Olympiads: academic competitions in linguistics for secondary school students. In Kristin Denham & Anne Lobeck (eds.), Linguistics at School. Language awareness in primary and secondary education, 213–226. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
  • Simpson, Jane & John Henderson. 2010. Australian Computational and Linguistics Olympiad. Cross Section 20. 1–5.