NAACL

Welcome

[video]

Welcome to the Fifth Workshop on Teaching NLP!

In this Jupyter book you will find all the necessary information related to the workshop.

Organizers

  • David Jurgens, University of Michigan

  • Varada Kolhatkar, University of British Columbia

  • Lucy Li, University of California, Berkeley

  • Margot Mieskes, Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences

  • Ted Pedersen, University of Minnesota, Duluth

Why Teaching NLP workshop?

The field of natural language processing (NLP) is growing rapidly with emergence of new state-of-the-art methods almost every year. As educators in the field, we are faced to make many decisions as to what to teach and how to do it. The fast-paced nature of NLP and popularity of NLP in different disciplines bring some unique challenges for curriculum design:

  • What fundamental concepts should we be teaching future NLP researchers and practitioners?

  • What kinds of paths through courses should we provide for students traversing an NLP-related degree?

  • How should we tailor our courses for wider audiences (e.g., for students from social sciences, humanities, medicine, and statistics)?

  • How do we scale our teaching for larger class sizes while preserving the accessibility of complex material?

  • How do we teach resposible and ethical use of NLP?

There have been four Teaching NLP workshops in the past. The last workshop happened in 2013 co-located with ACL in Sofia, Bulgaria. The field has changed quite a bit in the last 8 years and it is definitely time for the next workshop in the series.

Goals

By the end of of the workshop we hope to achieve the following high level goals.

  • Encourage a dialogue and collaboration between NLP educators and researchers in academia and industry to address the questions above.

  • Identify and document challenges in teaching and learning NLP in different contexts.

  • Provide a forum to share teaching and learning methodologies and tools in NLP education.

  • Compile resources for teaching and learning NLP that can last beyond the discussions held during the workshop.

Highlights of the program

  • 2 keynote talks

  • 2 panel discussions

  • 5 participatory events

  • 6 oral presentations

  • 20 posters

More information on the accepted papers

  • 13 long papers on NLP pedagogy and courses & curriculum

  • 13 short papers with teaching materials

    • 6 on courses & curriculum

    • 7 on tools & assignments

  • Demographics

    • 13 accepted submissions are from Europe

    • 13 from north America (12 USA, 1 Canada)