Abstract
NLP’s sphere of influence went much beyond computer science research and the development of software applications in the past decade. We see people using NLP methods in a range of academic disciplines from Asian Studies to Clinical Oncology. We also notice the presence of NLP as a module in most of the data science curricula within and outside of regular university setups. These courses are taken by students from very diverse backgrounds. This paper takes a closer look at some issues related to teaching NLP to these diverse audiences based on my classroom experiences, and identifies some challenges the instructors face, particularly when there is no ecosystem of related courses for the students. In this process, it also identifies a few challenge areas for both NLP researchers and tool developers.- Anthology ID:
- 2021.teachingnlp-1.25
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Teaching NLP
- Month:
- June
- Year:
- 2021
- Address:
- Online
- Editors:
- David Jurgens, Varada Kolhatkar, Lucy Li, Margot Mieskes, Ted Pedersen
- Venue:
- TeachingNLP
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 149–159
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2021.teachingnlp-1.25
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2021.teachingnlp-1.25
- Cite (ACL):
- Sowmya Vajjala. 2021. Teaching NLP outside Linguistics and Computer Science classrooms: Some challenges and some opportunities. In Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on Teaching NLP, pages 149–159, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Teaching NLP outside Linguistics and Computer Science classrooms: Some challenges and some opportunities (Vajjala, TeachingNLP 2021)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/dois-2013-emnlp/2021.teachingnlp-1.25.pdf