is held in the USA and in Canada. High school students in New Jersey can participate at the local competition site at 星空无限传媒 University.

The event consists of two rounds:聽
1) Open Round – January 29, 2026
2) Invitational Round – March 19, 2026

To register, please visit

The website also provides all of the competition rules as well as practice problems for students to review.

Open Round: January 29, 2026

Time
The doors will open at 9:30am. You should plan to be present at the contest room by 9:45. You should be seated by 9:55 when the announcements are read. The contest will start at 10:00 AM sharp, and will end 3 hours later at 1:00 PM.
Location
Cohen Lounge, Dickson Hall 178
星空无限传媒 University

Invitational Round:聽 March 19, 2026,

Time
9am -1pm (please, arrive before 9am)
Location
Center for Computing and Information Science – CCIS424 (NLP Lab)

Parking (for both rounds)
Visitor parking on campus is available at the Red Hawk Parking Garage.
For information on visitor parking, please visit: /facilities/our-services/parking-services/visitor-parking/

Important Information
鈥� Plan to be at the contest room at least 15 mins before the start of the contest (9:45).
鈥� Please bring your own black pen — all solutions must be written in pen. Scratch paper will be provided.
鈥� You are allowed a basic wristwatch (without built-in calculator) for time keeping. However, no electronic device is allowed; phones will need to be powered off during the competition
鈥� Bring water and snacks to keep yourself fresh and energized during the contest. Place them on the desk before the contest begins.
鈥� When you arrive, place your bags under your seats. You cannot use your bags during the contest.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us:

Assistant Professor, Linguistics
Email: barakl@montclair.edu

Anna Feldman, Ph.D.
Professor & Chair, Linguistics
feldmana@montclair.edu

The career opportunities for students learning world languages range immensely, even for those with only a few years of exposure. Students who have taken one of the 14 languages at Montclair alongside other studies are using their skills in fields from the arts to the sciences, from business to the humanities and health or social science fields. With the recent launch of the public Montclair CHILL – Career Hub for International Language Learning, students can explore career applications for their languages at any point in their college experience.

The launch on December 11 brought together faculty, advisors, administrators, career counselors, study abroad officers, Modern Language Association representatives, and students, all of whom explored this new online resource, received career advising on how to foreground their languages, and entered raffles to win internationally themed prizes. A particular highlight of the hub is the collection of Languages on the Job videos made by recent graduates who use their languages in fields ranging from IT to manga editing, HR and beyond.

Students can also experiment with finding a fit for their own personal interests with the . Here, they can learn about a variety of jobs that require or encourage language knowledge or proficiency, including positions as international admissions counselor, change management team member, court interpreter, online content editor for gaming sites, and dozens more across fields.

Montclair offers an innovative Language, Business & Culture interdisciplinary major with a capstone international experience. In addition, many students also choose to pursue a language as part of a double major or minor, or add on a faculty-led, summer, or semester-long study abroad experience in addition to their world language requirement to demonstrate their international flair.

Having explored another language shows employers in any field that you are ready to speak to partners on their terms and ready to manage new cultural situations.

At the launch, faculty members and College of Humanities and Social Sciences Career Services representatives reminded students of the importance of highlighting multilingual experiences on their resum茅s, and of connecting with alumni. They emphasized that language exploration reflects professional readiness, demonstrating cognitive flexibility, resourcefulness, and the ability to build bridges with collaborators here and abroad.

A faculty member told students, 鈥淣ew Jersey is so diverse. On the one hand, we have many immigrant groups here who need health, justice, and education professionals comfortable working in their languages. And at the same time, we are home to so many large and expanding international businesses where our students with language skills can make special connections with managers and international clients.鈥� Students applying for positions in these fields attract supervisors鈥� attention when they bring language skills to the table.

The CHILL website shares the stories of recent graduates using their language skills to facilitate internal communications at Audi, to recruit international students at colleges, to work abroad in their expert fields, and more. Professor Elizabeth Emery, who served as Principal Investigator on the Modern Language Association Pathways Grant that helped fund this grant, notes that this launch is only the beginning: 鈥淪o many doors open for graduates with language knowledge鈥揺ven just a few semesters of a language鈥揳nd so many Montclair students have amazing language skills, that we hope that these tools will help students and advisors showcase their talents. Visualizing the paths taken by recent graduates also helps make it much less scary to plan for the job search!鈥�

Students can meet to discuss how to use their languages with career advisors at the College for the Humanities and Social Sciences any time. The CHILL website is publicly accessible and will continue to serve as a career resource for students with language skills across all majors.

Curious what 14 languages Montclair teaches? Click here to find out!

is held in the USA and in Canada. High school students in New Jersey can participate at the local competition site at 星空无限传媒 University.

The event consists of two rounds:聽
1) Open Round – January 23, 2025
2) Invitational Round

To register, please visit

The website also provides all of the competition rules as well as practice problems for students to review.

Open Round: Thursday, January 23, 2025

Time
The doors will open at 9:30am. You should plan to be present at the contest room by 9:45. You should be seated by 9:55 when the announcements are read. The contest will start at 10:00 AM sharp, and will end 3 hours later at 1:00 PM.

Location
Dickson Hall
1st floor, room 178
星空无限传媒 University

Parking
Visitor parking on campus is available at the Red Hawk Parking Garage.
For information on visitor parking, please visit: /facilities/our-services/parking-services/visitor-parking/

Important Information
鈥� Plan to be at the contest room at least 15 mins before the start of the contest (9:45).
鈥� Please bring your own black pen — all solutions must be written in pen. Scratch paper will be provided.
鈥� You are allowed a basic wristwatch (without built-in calculator) for time keeping. However, no electronic device is allowed; phones will need to be powered off during the competition
鈥� Bring water and snacks to keep yourself fresh and energized during the contest. Place them on the desk before the contest begins.
鈥� When you arrive, place your bags under your seats. You cannot use your bags during the contest.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us:

Lauren Covey, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Linguistics
coveyl@montclair.edu

Anna Feldman, Ph.D.
Professor & Chair, Linguistics
feldmana@montclair.edu

is held in the USA and in Canada. High school students in New Jersey can participate at the local competition site at 星空无限传媒 University.

The event consists of two rounds:聽
1) Open Round – January 25, 2024
2) Invitational Round – March 14, 2024

To register, please visit

The website also provides all of the competition rules as well as practice problems for students to review.

Open Round: January 25, 2024

Time
The doors will open at 9:30am. You should plan to be present at the contest room by 9:45. You should be seated by 9:55 when the announcements are read. The contest will start at 10:00 AM sharp, and will end 3 hours later at 1:00 PM.

Location
Dickson Hall
1st floor, room 178
星空无限传媒 University

Parking
Visitor parking on campus is available at the Red Hawk Parking Garage.
For information on visitor parking, please visit: /facilities/our-services/parking-services/visitor-parking/

Important Information
鈥⒙� Plan to be at the contest room at least 15 mins before the start of the contest (9:45).
鈥⒙� Please bring your own black pen — all solutions must be written in pen. Scratch paper will be provided.
鈥⒙� You are allowed a basic wristwatch (without built-in calculator) for time keeping. However, no electronic device is 鈥� allowed; phones will need to be powered off during the competition.
鈥⒙� Bring water and snacks to keep yourself fresh and energized during the contest. Place them on the desk before the contest begins.
鈥⒙� When you arrive, place your bags under your seats. You cannot use your bags during the contest.

Top scorers in the Open Round in January will be eligible to compete in an Invitational Round on March 14, 2024. You should be able to view your Open Round score + Invitational Round qualification status on around March 1, 2024.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us:

Lauren Covey, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor, Linguistics
coveyl@montclair.edu

Jonathan Howell, Ph.D.
Associate Professor, Linguistics
howellj@montclair.edu

Anna Feldman, Ph.D.
Professor & Chair, Linguistics
feldmana@montclair.edu

Kelly Ortega and Zachary Schultz were selected for this program. They will be working with They’ll be working with and

Congratulations, Kelly and Zach! More internship positions are expected in Spring 2023.

Universal Information Extraction
Heng Ji, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Abstract: The big data boom in recent years covers a wide spectrum of heterogeneous data types, from text to image, video, speech, and multimedia. Most of the valuable information in such "big data" is encoded in natural language, which makes it accessible to some people 鈥� for example, those who can read that particular language 鈥� but much less amenable to computer processing beyond a simple keyword search. Information Extraction (IE) and Information Retrieval (IR) on a massive scale share the same goal of creating the next generation of information access in which humans can communicate with computers in any natural language beyond keyword search, by extracting and presenting the important and relevant information embedded in big data. IE aims extract structured facts from a wide spectrum of heterogeneous unstructured data types. Traditional IE techniques are limited to a certain source X (X = a particular language, domain, limited number of pre-defined fact types, single data modality, …). When moving from X to a new source Y, we need to start from scratch again by annotating a substantial amount of training data and developing Y-specific extraction capabilities. In this talk, I will present a new Universal IE paradigm to combine the merits of traditional IE (high quality and fine granularity) and Open IE (high scalability). This framework is able to discover schemas and extract facts from any input data in any domain, without any annotated training data, by integrating distributional semantics and symbolic semantics. It can also be extended to hundreds of languages, thousands of fact types and multiple data modalities by constructing a multi-lingual multi-media multi-task common semantic space and then performing zero-shot transfer learning across sources. I will also discuss possible research directions toward a symbiosis between universal IE and IR, using open-domain knowledge graphs constructed from this common space as an intermediate representation.

Bio: Heng Ji is the Edward P. Hamilton Chair Professor in Computer Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from New York University. Her research interests focus on Natural Language Processing, especially on Information Extraction and Knowledge Base Population. She was selected as “Young Scientist” and a member of the Global Future Council on the Future of Computing by the World Economic Forum in 2016, 2017 and 2018. She received “AI’s 10 to Watch” Award by IEEE Intelligent Systems in 2013, NSF CAREER award in 2009, Google Research Awards in 2009 and 2014, IBM Watson Faculty Award in 2012 and 2014, and Bosch Research Awards in 2015, 2016 and 2017. She coordinated the NIST TAC Knowledge Base Population task since 2010, and served as the Program Committee Co-Chair of several conferences including NAACL-HLT2018.

Their two papers were accepted to the 6th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing 2013 to be held on October 14-18 in Nagoya, Japan.

1. Matthew Mulholland and Joanne Quinn. “Suicidal Tendencies: The Automatic Classification of Suicidal and Non-Suicidal Lyricists Using NLP.”

2. Katsiaryna Aharodnik, Marco Chang, Anna Feldman, and Jirka Hana. “Automatic identification of learners’ language background based on their writing in Czech.”

Congratulations, Matt, Joanne, Katsiaryna and Marco!

About the Program
In September 2012, 星空无限传媒 University’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences began offering New Jersey’s first graduate certificate program in computational linguistics.

For more information about this growing and dynamic field, please visit News article:

and the Linguistics website at: 聽