Occam's Razor and Bender and Koller's Octopus

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.