In recent weeks, all of the top 20 competitors in the North American Computational Linguistics Olympiad (NACLO) have been preparing for the IOL. To prepare for the IOL, as well as select teams out of the top 20, online practice sessions were held via Skype. Using these practices, as well as related assignments, the teams were selected.
So far, the practices have mostly consisted of solving problems as a team. Many of the problems were past IOL team problems that required many people and were more difficult to solve. Vietnamese, from IOL 2009, was one that everyone never fully solved, since it was so long. Other problems included Armenian, which involved listening to sound files to write down Armenian in its own orthography, as well as translate the sentences to English.
In order to prepare for the IOL, all team members also individually solved the IOL 2010 team problem, Mongolian, and also wrote their own problems based on a specific linguistic phenomenon.
