Occam's Razor and Bender and Koller's Octopus
Michael Guerzhoy

TL;DR
This paper discusses the teaching of Bender and Koller's ACL 2020 paper on NLU, emphasizing understanding core arguments and engaging students with counter-arguments using provided teaching materials.
Contribution
It offers a pedagogical approach to teaching complex NLU debates, including curated teaching materials and a focus on critical engagement.
Findings
Enhanced teaching methods for NLU debates
Encourages critical thinking through counter-arguments
Provides practical teaching resources
Abstract
We discuss the teaching of the discussion surrounding Bender and Koller's prominent ACL 2020 paper, "Climbing toward NLU: on meaning form, and understanding in the age of data" \cite{bender2020climbing}. We present what we understand to be the main contentions of the paper, and then recommend that the students engage with the natural counter-arguments to the claims in the paper. We attach teaching materials that we use to facilitate teaching this topic to undergraduate students.
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Taxonomy
TopicsStatistics Education and Methodologies · Computational and Text Analysis Methods · Wittgensteinian philosophy and applications
