AI@SLU to Kick off First Contest
Are you ready to put your world language skills and powers of prediction to the test for a chance to win prizes?
The AI@SLU Big Idea group is launching a new monthly contest series for the SLU community this month, and its first competition will challenge Billikens to put their linguistic skills to work as students, faculty and staff members compete to predict characters of sentences that have been translated into five different languages: Afrikaans, Chichewa, English, Irish Gaelic and Spanish. The AI@SLU Big Idea is focused on artificial intelligence (AI) research.
The contest kicks off on Monday, Aug. 31 with daily predictions through much of September.
Pre-registration for the competition is required prior to the contest’s opening. The contest’s first predictions are due at 11: 59 p.m. on Monday, Aug. 31.
How to Play
Members of the AI@SLU group have taken a sentence and sourced translations of it into five world languages (Afrikaans, Chichewa, English, Irish Gaelic and Spanish).
Each day in September, one new character for each sentence will be released. On the day before each release, contestants will try to guess what character they think is the next to come out. Players will get three guesses and points will be assigned per right guess: five (5) points if a player’s first guess on the upcoming character is correct; three (3) if the second guess is correct; or one (1) point if the third guess is correct. No points will be awarded if none of the three guesses match the released character.
Winners in each of the contest’s categories (undergraduate, graduate, and faculty/staff) will receive prizes based on their point tallies. An overall cash prize will be given to the winner from each division for cumulative points across all five languages. Winners will also be determined for each individual language.
Players who choose to join the contest later in September can do so by registering, but will miss out on the competition’s first prediction and points opportunities.
Learn More About the Contest
AI@SLU’s inaugural contest focuses on playfully bringing technologists and non-technologists together as they combine science and the humanities for a chance to win prizes, Michael Goldwasser, Ph.D., chair of the Department of Computer Science in the College of Arts and Sciences, said.
“While it would be possible to throw heavy computational/statistical modeling at this problem, we expect anyone interested in languages can do well by simply reasoning about what they think is most likely,” explained Goldwasser. “In fact, as all five sentences are translations of each other, information might become evident in one language before another, helping you improve all your predictions.”
Designed around the theme of world languages and natural language processing, the competition focuses specifically on predictive text technology that is commonly used in devices such as cellphones or web browsers to help make suggestions for users.
This month’s contest is officially sponsored by the AI@SLU Big Idea group in partnership with the Department of Languages, Literature, and Cultures; the Department of Computer Science; and the Department of Mathematics and Statistics.
Other AI@SLU Upcoming Events
AI@SLU is also launching two other monthly series.
- A technical hands-on tutorial series on techniques of AI will begin at 3 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 16, with an exploration of Hidden Markov Models led by David Letscher, Ph.D., of the Department of Computer Science.
- A seminar series on Impacts of artificial intelligence (AI) begins on Thursday, Sept. 24, with a talk from Br. William Rehg, S.J., of the College of Philosophy and Letters and College of Arts and Sciences.