Splash Biography



SIDA CHEN, Yale first year studying linguistics+CS+stats




Major: S&DS + Linguistics

College/Employer: Yale

Year of Graduation: 2026

Picture of Sida Chen

Brief Biographical Sketch:

In high school, I participated in IOLC (the Chinese linguistics olympiad) for two years, reaching the qualification round for the Chinese IOL national team (although I didn't make it...)

At Yale, I spent the past year coaching local high school students for NACLO (North American Computational Linguistics Open Competition). I tutored the advanced group and introduced them to a series of problems, from phonology to morphology, from syntax to semantics.

Apart from linguistics, my curriculum also includes a lot of computer science, math, and statistics classes. In my free time, I enjoy doing open-source contributions through coding and writing documentation. I'm also a Coldplay fan.



Past Classes

  (Clicking a class title will bring you to the course's section of the corresponding course catalog)

X4690: How do people around the world count sheep in Splash Spring 2023 (Apr. 01, 2023)
We sometimes take base-10 number systems for granted: we've been told since middle school that the second-last digit in a number represents "tens" because humans have ten fingers for counting. However, languages around the world display an amazing variety in how they count. This class will decrypt the number systems of several languages through some interesting linguistics competition problems. You will decipher what "àádota" means in Yoruba (a language in West Africa), do basic arithmetic in Khmer (a language in Cambodia), and see how Pame (a language in Ecuador) speakers use "people" as a counting unit!