Barend Beekhuizen, Ewan Dunbar, and Shohini Bhattasali are the recipients of the School of Graduate Studies' Graduate Education Innovation Fund (GEIF) for their project, Computing Linguistics: Online Mastery Learning Modules for Computational Linguistics. The purpose of the GEIF is to enrich the learning experience of graduate students by supporting projects within and across academic divisions and units, that create positive, innovative changes in the design and delivery of graduate education at the University of Toronto. As part of this pedagogical project, they will be conducting workshops, targeted at graduate students, this year and next year.
A short summary of their project:
Graduate education across the social sciences and humanities is faced with a skills gap. Computational and statistical skills have become critical for understanding and participating in current research. At the same time, students are demanding transferable skills to boost their hireability, inside and outside academia. This major training problem demands pedagogical innovation.
Linguistics, the study of human language, is an increasingly interdisciplinary field at the forefront of this change. Neural networks and other statistical language and speech models are becoming common tools in all areas of linguistics. Experimental approaches to understanding language have also become more methodologically demanding. Yet, for many decades, computational approaches to language were mostly restricted to technological applications (machine translation, speech recognition) and made little contact with the field of linguistics. As a result, linguistics curricula were not designed for these new and demanding methods.
Our novel approach has two goals: to create a coherent broad-coverage set of online self-guided course materials in computational linguistics for graduate students with a linguistics background; alongside this, to construct large banks of pedagogical exercises that are meaningful to linguistics students, to allow for high-volume, self-guided practice. By documenting the decisions we make, we aim for our experience to inform similar projects in social sciences and humanities.