Providing Sources and Answers in NACLO Problem Submissions

Background

The questions below are intended for authors who are submitting problems to NACLO. Answering the questions is optional—you should feel free to submit problems even if you don’t feel like answering these questions. However, if you do answer the questions, it will make our lives easier—and that will make us more likely to use your problem(s)!

The easiest way to answer the questions is by providing the information in an extra page (or pages) inside your problem submission. If that doesn’t work for you, you can instead email us at elclosubmissions@gmail.com.

The questions

Question 1: Sources. What source(s) did you use for the data in the problem? We ask for this information because we aim to verify the accuracy of any materials we release. The more detail you can provide, the better (e.g., you could provide page numbers for the specific sentences that you used, or page numbers describing the rules that you focused on). See the bottom of this page for more details and examples.

Question 2: Answers. What are the answers to your problem? It’s especially helpful if you include a description of the linguistic information behind the answers. E.g., if the problem is about syntax, you could provide a brief description of the syntax rules that drive the problem; or if the problem is about a writing system, you could provide a key showing how each symbol in the writing system corresponds to phonetic characters or Roman letters. Note that such descriptions do not need to be elaborate—often a simple table is sufficient. And if you don’t have time to provide a full description of the rules, it is still helpful to provide the answers to the questions.

More details about providing your sources

If you used published sources, please point us to these sources and describe how you used them in as much detail as possible. Ideally, we will be able to figure out where each example came from, so anything that helps us toward this goal is much appreciated. Here are some types of information that are especially helpful:

• Page numbers of the specific examples you used
• URL(s) linking to your source(s), if available
• Clarification about whether you used exact published examples or constructed new examples on your own (or a mix of both)
• Description of any ways in which you simplified the phenomenon for purposes of the problem. (We prefer for the data to be fully accurate, but we understand that sometimes it makes for a better problem if you simplify the data somewhat—that's fine, as long as we know about it so that we can mention the simplification when we release the problem)

Here are examples of what a description of your sources might look like:

• "All of the examples are taken directly from BOOKTITLE. Specifically, they are example 17 on page 93, example 2 on page 111, example 45 on page 113, and examples 1 through 7 on page 248."
• "The problem is based on a grammatical phenomenon described on pages 93 to 95 of BOOKTITLE. Several of the examples are taken from that passage (specifically, examples 1 through 5 in the problem correspond to sentences 3 to 7 on page 94 of the book). To round out the problem, I constructed six additional examples by applying the rules on pages 95 and 113 to vocabulary items from TITLE OF DICTIONARY. I simplified the rules slightly by ignoring the intervocalic voicing rule described at the bottom of page 95."

If the data have been verified by a native speaker of the language, or by a linguist who is an expert in the language, please let us know. (The native speaker or linguist could be you, or someone else whom you consulted with.) Some of our best problems have been created by, or in consultation with, native speakers or expert linguists. To be clear, it is not necessary for you to consult with an expert—but if you have done so, it is helpful for us to know about it!

For some problems, sources may not be needed; e.g., this is often the case for computational problems that use exclusively English data. In such cases, feel free to write "Sources: Not applicable" in your problem submission.