@conference {13739, title = {Combining open-source with research to re-engineer a hands-on introductory NLP course}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Issues in Teaching Computational Linguistics}, series = {TeachCL {\textquoteright}08}, year = {2008}, month = {2008///}, pages = {71 - 79}, publisher = {Association for Computational Linguistics}, organization = {Association for Computational Linguistics}, address = {Stroudsburg, PA, USA}, 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.}, isbn = {978-1-932432-14-5}, url = {http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1627306.1627318}, author = {Madnani,Nitin and Dorr, Bonnie J} }