Combining open-source with research to re-engineer a hands-on introductory NLP course

Authors:
Nitin Madnani;Bonnie J. Dorr
Affiliations:
University of Maryland, College Park;University of Maryland, College Park
Venue:
TeachCL '08 Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Issues in Teaching Computational Linguistics
Year:
2008

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Abstract

We describe our first attempts to re-engineer the curriculum of our introductory NLP course by using two important building blocks: (1) Access to an easy-to-learn programming language and framework to build hands-on programming assignments with real-world data and corpora and, (2) Incorporation of interesting ideas from recent NLP research publications into assignment and examination problems. We believe that these are extremely important components of a curriculum aimed at a diverse audience consisting primarily of first-year graduate students from both linguistics and computer science. Based on overwhelmingly positive student feedback, we find that our attempts were hugely successful.