Concrete assignments for teaching NLP in an M.S. program

Authors:
Reva Freedman
Affiliations:
Northern Illinois University, DeKalb, IL
Venue:
TeachNLP '05 Proceedings of the Second ACL Workshop on Effective Tools and Methodologies for Teaching Natural Language Processing and Computational Linguistics
Year:
2005

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Abstract

The professionally oriented computer science M.S. students at Northern Illinois University are intelligent, interested in new ideas, and have good programming skills and a good math background. However, they have no linguistics background, find traditional academic prose difficult and uninteresting, and have had no exposure to research. Given this population, the assignments I have found most successful in teaching Introduction to NLP involve concrete projects where students could see for themselves the phenomena discussed in class. This paper describes three of my most successful assignments: duplicating Kernighan et al.'s Bayesian approach to spelling correction, a study of Greenberg's universals in the student's native language, and a dialogue generation project. For each assignment I discuss what the students learned and why the assignment was successful.