Benjamin Dong, a senior at the Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences, and the Arts, placed in the Top 10 in the LingHacks VI competition.
LingHacks VI was a high school computational linguistics hackathon competition. LingHacks is an international nonprofit dedicated to harnessing the intersection of math and language to equip students of all backgrounds with cutting-edge technology, problem-solving and interdisciplinary skills, according to the organization’s website.
LingHacks VI was a weekend-long invention competition in which participants built a software project that integrates computational linguistics and may or may not solve a scientific or social problem. Computational linguistics, also known as natural language processing, is the field of artificial intelligence that applies to the synthesis and analysis of language and speech, according to the LingHacks website. Computational linguistics tools are used by machine language technologies, voice assistants, search engines and chatbots, for example.
The hackathon was held over the weekend of June 14-15. Dong began brainstorming ideas around 11 a.m. on Saturday once the contest’s theme was announced and began working on the actual project about 2 or 3 in the afternoon after scrapping other ideas. He worked throughout Saturday and into Sunday. He said it took him about 15 hours of work to submit the project, including a video and written summary of the project. While it was functionable, it was not fully trained, he said.
Dong said he found out about 10 p.m. on that Sunday that he had placed in the top 10 out of 88 participants. The contest was judged by a mix of working professionals, educators and postsecondary students in the field.
“I was honestly surprised considering that my project was not completed. Seeing (that he had placed in the top 10) made me feel that all the time I spent was not for nothing,” he said.
For placing in the top 10, Dong was awarded a week’s access to a coding interview prep course from Interview Cake. He said he plans on entering similar contests in the future, either solo or as a member of a team. “I’d like to build on this experience, improve my skills and hopefully complete my project next time with no errors,” he said.