Teaching a Massive Open Online Course on Natural Language Processing

TL;DR

This paper introduces a comprehensive 12-week MOOC on Natural Language Processing designed for non-English speakers, combining lectures, practicals, and coding assignments to teach core NLP concepts and recent advances.

Contribution

It presents the design and implementation of a new NLP MOOC that emphasizes practical skills, multilingual processing, and recent transformer-based models for non-English students.

Findings

Positive student feedback received early 2021

Course effectively covers core NLP concepts and recent advances

Includes practical coding assignments and multilingual focus

Abstract

This paper presents a new Massive Open Online Course on Natural Language Processing, targeted at non-English speaking students. The course lasts 12 weeks; every week consists of lectures, practical sessions, and quiz assignments. Three weeks out of 12 are followed by Kaggle-style coding assignments. Our course intends to serve multiple purposes: (i) familiarize students with the core concepts and methods in NLP, such as language modeling or word or sentence representations, (ii) show that recent advances, including pre-trained Transformer-based models, are built upon these concepts; (iii) introduce architectures for most demanded real-life applications, (iv) develop practical skills to process texts in multiple languages. The course was prepared and recorded during 2020, launched by the end of the year, and in early 2021 has received positive feedback.