Concrete Assignments for Teaching NLP in an M.S. Program

摘要

The professionally oriented computerscience M.S. students at Northern IllinoisUniversity are intelligent, interested innew ideas, and have good programmingskills and a good math background.However, they have no linguisticsbackground, find traditional academicprose difficult and uninteresting, and havehad no exposure to research. Given thispopulation, the assignments I have foundmost successful in teaching Introduction toNLP involve concrete projects wherestudents could see for themselves thephenomena discussed in class. This paperdescribes three of my most successfulassignments: duplicating Kernighan etal.’s Bayesian approach to spellingcorrection, a study of Greenberg’suniversals in the student’s native language,and a dialogue generation project. Foreach assignment I discuss what thestudents learned and why the assignmentwas successful.