%0 Conference Paper %B Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Issues in Teaching Computational Linguistics %D 2008 %T Combining open-source with research to re-engineer a hands-on introductory NLP course %A Madnani,Nitin %A Dorr, Bonnie J %X 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. %B Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Issues in Teaching Computational Linguistics %S TeachCL '08 %I Association for Computational Linguistics %C Stroudsburg, PA, USA %P 71 - 79 %8 2008/// %@ 978-1-932432-14-5 %G eng %U http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1627306.1627318