Combining open-source with research to re-engineer a hands-on introductory NLP course

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.