Natural Language Processing 4 All (NLP4All): A New Online Platform for Teaching and Learning NLP Concepts

TL;DR

NLP4All is an online platform designed to make NLP concepts accessible and interactive for learners and educators, especially those with limited coding skills, to broaden participation and understanding of NLP.

Contribution

The paper introduces NLP4All, a web-based tool that simplifies NLP learning and teaching for non-programmers, addressing educational barriers in NLP literacy.

Findings

NLP4All enables interactive NLP learning for non-programmers.

The platform increases accessibility to NLP tools and data.

It facilitates interdisciplinary engagement with NLP concepts.

Abstract

Natural Language Processing offers new insights into language data across almost all disciplines and domains, and allows us to corroborate and/or challenge existing knowledge. The primary hurdles to widening participation in and use of these new research tools are, first, a lack of coding skills in students across K-16, and in the population at large, and second, a lack of knowledge of how NLP-methods can be used to answer questions of disciplinary interest outside of linguistics and/or computer science. To broaden participation in NLP and improve NLP-literacy, we introduced a new tool web-based tool called Natural Language Processing 4 All (NLP4All). The intended purpose of NLP4All is to help teachers facilitate learning with and about NLP, by providing easy-to-use interfaces to NLP-methods, data, and analyses, making it possible for non- and novice-programmers to learn NLP concepts interactively.