Teaching NLP to Computer Science Majors via Applications and Experiments

Most computer science majors at Northern Illinois University, whether at the B.S. or M.S. level, are professionally oriented. However, some of the best students are willing to try something completely different. NLP is a challenge for them because most have no background in linguistics or artificial intelligence, have little experience in reading traditional academic prose, and are unused to open-ended assignments with gray areas. In this paper I describe a syllabus for Introduction to NLP that concentrates on applications and motivates concepts through student experiments. Core materials include an introductory linguistics textbook, the Jurafsky and Martin textbook, the NLTK book, and a