LTI Education Committee Report Alon Lavie LTI Retreat March 2, 2012

LTI Education Committee Standing LTI Faculty committee mandated to review discuss and propose changes to the LTI education programs and course offerings Meets about once a month over lunch Primary activities include: –Reviewing new course proposals from faculty –Assisting with speaker recruitment for the LTI colloquium –Special tasks and projects related to our educational programs Current members: Bob Frederking, Carolyn Rose, Noah Smith, Alan Black, Eric Nyberg, Teruko Mitamura, Ralf Brown, Alon Lavie December 8, : Algorithms for NLP2

LTI Curriculum Review Special project the committee took upon itself in the fall Goals: –Develop a more comprehensive understanding of the current state of our curriculum and how it has evolved over the years –Are our current course offerings appropriate and necessary for our graduate programs? –Do we have significant gaps that need to be filled? –Analyze student enrollment in our courses, how it has changed over the years, and draw conclusions –Draw conclusions regarding potential changes in our course offerings, their scheduling, frequency, and/or sequencing –Look at the LTI teaching requirements and salary compensation model and whether it should be tweaked or modified

LTI Curriculum Review So far mostly a fact and information gathering exercise with some limited amount of analysis performed by individual committee members Three main sub-tasks: –A comparison of our LTI course offerings with similar course offerings at major competing peer institutions. –An analysis of student enrollment data in our courses over the past 15 years. –A basic-level comparison of the teaching requirements and teaching compensation model used across the various departments and units within SCS

LTI Curriculum Review A full report of findings from these three activities was circulated by yesterday I will present highlights from the findings Faculty discussion and guidance: –What other information should we be gathering? –What kinds of analyses would you like to see on this data? –Goal is to come up with some recommendations regarding changes to our courses, our programs and/or our teaching salary compensation model. –Full faculty will get to discuss any proposed changes

Comparison of LTI Course Offerings with Peer Institutions Compiled by Noah Smith and Ralf Brown Looked at course offerings at Edinburgh, JHU and Stanford and attempted to map these to equivalent courses at LTI/SCS Departmental structures are somewhat different Table of LTI courses and their corresponding equivalents Table of SCS courses typically taken by LTI students and their corresponding equivalents Table of courses offered by peers that we don’t have

Comparison of LTI Course Offerings with Peer Institutions General Findings: –We are very strong on speech offerings, maybe rivaled by JHU. –We are stronger than these peers in information retrieval offerings. –We are relatively weak on linguistics offerings. Courses that make the LTI special, compared to this set of peers: –Grammars and lexicons (721) has a “grammar engineering” analogue at Stanford, but is unique in being an LT-oriented introduction to the phenomena of human language. – Machine translation (731) as a full-on course –Structured prediction (763), an advanced statistical NLP course (this course combines two older courses, Language and Statistics 2 (762) and Information Extraction (748)). –Social media analysis (772). –Software engineering courses (791 and 792) that emphasize language technologies. –Inventing future services (794). –Summarization and personal information management (899).

Comparison of LTI Course Offerings with Peer Institutions Obvious ideas for courses offered by peers but not by LTI: –Intro to programming for language technologies, for new MLTs who lack a CS background. This could become a service course for CS masters and PhD students from other applied SCS departments who need to catch up on programming skills quickly. –Bioinformatics. Should discuss with faculty in the Lane Center for Computational Biology. –Cognitive science of language. Should discuss with faculty in Psychology. –Data mining (and text mining); likely of interest to some students in Tepper and Heinz. –Corpus linguistics. Should discuss with Linguistics faculty in Modern Languages, English, and Philosophy.

Enrollment Data Analysis Compiled by Bob Frederking Based on a spreadsheet generated from a database dump containing every registration for an 11-xxx course since Fall There is a line in the spreadsheet for each student in each class each semester, for a total of 7328 raw data points. Note that this total includes 119xx research registrations and LTI Colloquium registrations. These have been filtered out of the following charts, except where explicitly shown.

Course Enrollments

Total cumulative course enrollments sorted by size

Discussion