Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Issues in Teaching Computational Linguistics - TeachCL '08

Abstract

Many of us in this field face the daily challenge of trying to teach computer scientists, linguists and/or psychologists together. Following the success of the two previous ACL workshops (2002 and 2005, http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~radev/TeachingNLP) on this theme, we held this 2-day workshop associated with ACL-HLT 2008 to carefully examine the advantages and disadvantages of an interdisciplinary approach, and to explore techniques specifically aimed at teaching programming to social scientists and linguistics to computer scientists. As computational linguistics (hopefully) becomes of more and more relevance to industrial applications, we must ensure that our students (both undergraduate and graduate) are given adequate preparation for functioning in a practical industrial environment as well as an academic research environment. We need to exchange views on appropriate curriculum for both undergraduate students and graduate students, and linguists, psychologists and computer scientists. There are many questions to be addressed about the necessary background for linguists, psychologists and computer scientists before they can communicate effectively with each other and learn at the same pace. How much math is necessary? Is it possible to teach linguists Natural Language Processing techniques without first teaching them how to program? Can undergraduates hold their own in graduate courses? Can linguists and computer scientists make separate but equal contributions to term projects? How can linguistics students get ACL publications? What is the relevance of psycholinguistics? In addition to fifteen high quality reviewed papers and an invited talk by Lori Levin and Drago Radev on the recent very successful American Computational Linguistics Olympiad, the program includes three panels: a panel on industry expectations for computational linguists organized by Chris Brew; a panel on essential curriculum for computational linguistics organized by Emily Bender and Fei Xia; and a panel on techniques for teaching extremely interdisciplinary classes organized by Gina Levow.